My parents would have the ABC news on at home each night, and I'm pretty sure I remember the news item reporting the establishment of that first Internet connection to Australia, into Melbourne University in 1989. I would have been 12 years old, and wasn't much of a computer enthusiast (though we had them at home as my father was an electronics engineer); I just remember seeing it on the news and thinking "that seems important".
Just 6 years later, when I started university (in a course I didn't much care for as no profession or career seemed of much interest), as I sat at a computer lab PC and started perusing the Windows 3.11 desktop, I saw the Netscape icon, clicked on it, started browsing - finding music lyrics and chat boards, and sporting results and transgressive humour, and thought "OK, this is exciting". Pretty soon I was building webpages and thinking about how to turn this into a career.
The first internet-related job I got was for OzEmail, in 1999, in the building that was previously occupied by corporate-focused ISP Access One (OzEmail had acquired it from Solution6). Access One had been founded by Labtam, a company that was formed in 1972 making/importing scientific instruments, then made PCs in the 80s, then in 1989 developed a world-first RISC-based X terminal and started exporting it globally [1][2]. Once I was chatting with a guy I'd gotten to know at OzEmail, who'd started as an Access One phone support rep then learned about Cisco routers and soon became a network engineer, and he pointed into the server room at the rack where he'd installed the first Yahoo mirror in Australia. All this was going on in a nondescript light-industrial area of Braeside in outer south-eastern Melbourne. There was still a Labtam office in that street when I worked at OzEmail, and old X terminals lying around the office. They let me take one home once and I tried to connect it up to my home network. I didn't get very far, but it was a bit of fun. These days I live past Braeside and occasionally drive down that road and reminisce, lamenting that the people working for the construction and import/export companies occupying those buildings now would have little knowledge or care for what feats of innovation and commerce that had happened there in decades past.
I once had to email Robert Elz in order to apply for a .org.au domain name for a community group I was in. He was cranky that my DNS records weren't set up right, but we got there eventually (he must have been extremely busy and it could often take a long time to get a response; someone once told me gifts of good Scotch could help move things along). I've often wondered what he thought of the way control of the .au tld was given to Melbourne IT, and privatised in a way that enriched the University and also established clients of their IPO underwriters, JB Were. It really didn't seem much in the spirit of the early internet, of which he was such a champion.
Sometimes I think it would be fun to do a bunch of interviews with the people making everything happen back then and make a podcast or video series about it. It was such an exciting time and I feel lucky to have been there when it was just taking off. I'd love to help document it for posterity. (If anybody reading this happens to know of anyone who was at Labtam in the early 90s I'd love an intro.)
I was half your age in 89, so don't remember the news item, but I have strong memories of the Netscape and ozemal icons taking up estate on my step mum's compaq in the mid 90s. She was writing her PhD on it, and technically we weren't even allowed into the "office", let alone on the computer. Yet somehow I found time between 3.15 (when the school bus dropped me outside) and 4.30 (when she got home from uni) to work out what it was, connect and turn on the modem, hunt down the ozemail card and access password (after days of trial and error pw prompt denials), connect, explore first the boundaries of the ozemail portal and then beyond, and ultimately build a number of (local) personal websites using tables and hotlinked pictures that I hid in an official looking folder structure. This probably happened over many months, with the help of various co-conspirators (I would have had little idea of what the internet was before starting out, we had computers in our small state primary school, but the best thing they had on them was sim city). I was finally found out (though not red handed) when she came home early one day and picked up the phone in the living room ... at which point I bolted out the back door.
Funnily I didn't really do any elective computer subjects in high school when they were available, but I did spend a lot of time at home on my step mum's computer, chatting on ICQ, making websites and playing with graphics programs like paint and cool 3d. And eventually won my first computer at the end of high school (from channel V the pay tv music channel in Australia, tho truthfully I was a dyed in the wool rage child) with an animation of a frog jumping into a fan, made with a pirated version of Macromedia flash, downloaded in many chunks over 56k ozemail dialup.
The pioneering efforts of the early Australian net scene was lost on me. But it also shaped me. I'd love to see the doco.
> Sometimes I think it would be fun to do a bunch of interviews with the people making everything happen back then and make a podcast or video series about it.
The first Australian BBS | internet (pre WWW HTML) bridge I regularly dialed into (early 1980s) was run by Trevor Marshall who also built an amp or two for AC/DC's Bon Scott in the 1970s.
He features in BBS: The Documentary which might tickle your fancy or prompt you to chase up famous names from Whirlpool and interview them before they croak.
There's a YouTube channel/patreon you might enjoy called "The Serial Port", some guys refurbishing historical equipment and setting up a 90s era ISP for fun :D
Ha, I remember that news item, although from the other end of the world, and not really sure where I read it. The gist was that the first email had been sent to Australia, and I do distinctly remember that Melbourne was the endpoint.
We certainly had email before 1989. I managed systems at another university and had a working .edu.au email address there, email servers and a usenet feed, and had left that job by late 1986. In fact one of my systems was a beta for 4.2 BSD and I remember the protocol change to TCP from whatever came before it. At the same time Australia’s TLD changed from .oz to .au. Wikipedia says 4.2BSD came out in August 1983, so the 4.1z beta we ran must have come before that.
The University of Melbourne (munnari.oz) had a leased line to DEC’s Western Research Labs (decwrl) over which all of Australia’s traffic flowed. My systems connected to the Computer Science department’s machine, which had a link to munnari. Netnews was an overnight affair, and email slow. It was possible to remotely log in to an MIT system.
My formative memories were on YoYo, a Monash University student group-owned DEC Alpha which was so overloaded with users that it never saw a load average not in the triple digits...
... and had an EFnet server that could only run from 9pm to 5am or so because it'd otherwise cripple connectivity (even before DoS style stuff).
Ours was via the network, although I think we didn’t take the alt tree.
Unix distributions, on the other hand, arrived on 9-track tape via the “distribution tree”. You would get a copy, then make copies and send those on. Bug reports (at least in my experience) went back the same way. I found the TCP URGENT off-by-one bug in the BSD API, and tried to report it to my upstream; it came back “will not fix”, but it was unclear whether that was some gatekeeper between me and BSD.
Peter Stamp, AARNet was one of their engineers. And, Scott Calwell (Vocus), and Mark Treacy. They worked on the X terminal and the i960 based network devices, and the architecture of the access-1 network.
Thanks for that. I see them all on LinkedIn. I at least remember Peter's name from those days - perhaps in help desk tickets or internal documents.
I'd forgotten something else till I read one of their work bios: I'd just thought OzE bought AOne for the corporate/govt customers (who included Coles Myer and Aus Post), but they also bought it because the AOne network was a more robust network than OzE's. Those Labtam guys were just very good engineers.
Edit: Oh you were there too. Awesome. Malcolm Rd represent.
> Ownership of the Australian internet was transferred to Telstra in 1995, as private consumers and small businesses began to move online.
A bit of a weird thing to write. Telstra never “owned” the Australian internet, actually they tried very hard to undermine it, with MSN - which most people forget/don’t know actually started life as a dialup walled garden.
There was at least one hard working Aussie ISP that had their own international transit - Connect.com. Connect did ultimately drop their independent transit in favour of Telstra, but IIRC that was the end of them - lack of independent transit meant they were paying the same wholesale rate as everyone else. It was sad to see them fail.
Some friends and I founded one of Australia’s very early regional ISPs, in Ballarat, and I’m quite proud that I personally gave quite a few people their first experience on the dialup internet.
We ended up buying our own transit too, in fact we were the first Australian ISP to use satellite for backhaul, our transit was commissioned a few weeks before Optus.
Connectivity was charged per byte downloaded, but uploaded was free. So we set up asymmetric routing where downloads came over satellite direct from the USA, while uploads went via Telstra. This dramatically reduced the cost of internet, at the expense of a small amount of latency, which nobody really noticed considering that it was mostly dialup and that terrestrial links were very oversubscribed.
Telstra eventually got wise and started charging for total (up+down) but it was still cheaper to do it our way. I think it worked financially and practically (in terms of latency) until the first big cable was laid, Southern Cross. But by then I was out of the game.
Maybe not, but for a not insignificant period of time, before Connect showed up, they did own about the only international transit.
I ended up in the early-mid 90s doing some work for a guy who I dropped when I realized he was basically doing some spam-pyramid double play, but had paid for space in a very nice datacenter, and I figured out when I downloaded Navigator 2.0 from the datacenter, for a few seconds I was using something like 5% of Australia's international bandwidth.
> So we set up asymmetric routing where downloads came over satellite direct from the USA, while uploads went via Telstra.
That sounds entirely familiar too. I did some work for Crown Casino where I learned that Telstra would set up links with you of any size, they didn't care, just charged you 19c/mb (fucking ouch), and Crown had 100mbps backup fiber in 1994.
The company I worked at before I joined the ISP had an AARnet connection via the university, and maybe this was operated by Telstra? It was at this company that I downloaded and compiled Mosaic for X.
By the time we started the ISP, which must have been 1994, I think Connect was up and running.
Yeah bandwidth was expensive, for others reading this it was 19c (or whatever) per megabyte of wholesale data - not per megabit/second. So if you downloaded a 10MB file then the wholesale cost was $1.90. Almost everything in Australia was charged by volume rather than capacity back then.
We started out charging $5/hour for dialup access - and we were super popular. Imagine that! Of course I had a PAPL (fixed line) to home, it was sweet.
I guess I’ve been permanently connected to the internet for longer than almost anyone in Australia.
I was at labtam/access-1 and connect with a bunch of people across this time. Stressful at the time, better memories now. The deployment of the first squid caches and their ultimate effect on the bottom line was .. amazing.
Wiring up country Qld towns was an eye opener for a city boy. People were literally crying, getting high speed local service delivery, having been on the end of a long-line ISDN service back to Brisbane instead of a local in-town feed.
Yeah - I look back at the crew I worked with and it was stressful, but ultimately we all cared deeply about what we were doing. I wish I could find something like that today.
Access-1 brings back memories. They really had a huge opportunity but from our perspective they blew it.
My memory is weak but IIRC we were desperate for bandwidth and A1 had a copper pair to the local library capable of delivering 2Mbps - which we were told was not actually terminated. We tried to get A1 to talk to us, they said talk to the library, the library refused to meet with us. It all fell apart not long after.
The timeline is hazy now but I think this was a driver for our satellite business, and we ended up outlasting almost everyone - at least until the First Great Consolidation after Comindico hit town.
A1 built tails mostly at 64 and 2mbit to the first generation integrated modems. The backbone was otherwise built using Telecom Australia/Telstra's Metro Network product, which ran out of W.A. and was very unforgiving. Rackable modem product was complicated to run. The Cisco integrated device was nice, but it's s/w stack was immature (I also worked on this at connect IIRC)
There were often boundary issues around who talked to whom, who was an ISP, who wanted to be, who was an intermediary. Having a pair into an MDF was the least of the problems sometimes, I went to some meetings (I'd rather forget) about peering (financial settlement) issues. Ideally yes, you'd just plug stuff in and go. In reality, that wasn't how business worked.
Labtam had a /16 direct from IANA, (not through AUNIC) from their manufacturing days. Now, that would be worth $3.5m -At the time, it was a godsend but not enough. The company had been bought at a low point in Australian PCB manufacturing at a stock-sale floor price, by two "entrepreneurs" who may well have been good businessmen but didn't understand the Internet one bit. Maybe they understood it too well, I remember a screaming match at a pre-sales tech meetup where one of them floated heads-up 3D VRML shopping malls and when I said "not technically feasible yet" I was roundly pasted for being defeatist. I didn't last in that company long.
Yeah, we were hopeful that we could benefit from the A1 backbone - it was funded by the government right? like a precursor to NBN - but we ended up going it alone.
I won't talk about NBN, what a shitshow. The economics of the internet in Australia have already been terrible, and the government never seems to invest in the places where it could have the most impact.
For some reason I can see the Labtam logo in my mind's eye, but I can't remember why I know it. We used a lot of JTEC gear in the olden days. Did they end up buying Labtam maybe? I have no idea any more!
it was funded by the government right? like a precursor to NBN
It was always privately owned: built by Labtam (I guess they saw it as a complementary service to their X terminal product), then acquired by Solution6, then OzEmail, then UUnet. I think they had some government clients though. Certainly Australia Post was one.
For some reason I can see the Labtam logo in my mind's eye, but I can't remember why I know it. We used a lot of JTEC gear in the olden days. Did they end up buying Labtam maybe? I have no idea any more!
They had a big business in the 90s selling X terminals (see my root-level comment). I'd guess that's most likely where you saw the brand. After that subsided it looks (from the Wayback machine) like they just did general electronic devices design/manufacture, before eventually going out of business in about 2016.
Ahh maybe it was the X terminals I remember. Probably from a magazine though. The only X terminals I got to use personally were from NCD, DG, HP and Apollo - and that was all before the ISP, since Linux was obviously pretty big by then.
It’s a long time ago now and I’m quite hazy on the details. Would have been the mid 90s. It must have been 1994-98, and probably we got the satellite link in 96?
I don’t remember what Telstra used, I think maybe there was a cable going to Singapore? But I’m not at all certain about that.
Almost certainly correct. We started with 56k async ISDN, then 64k and ultimately 2Mbps - all ISDN back to Melbourne (120km) which cost a literal fortune.
Satellite (and squid!) changed the cost basis dramatically.
Something that was unique at the time was that we couldn’t get ahead of our bandwidth growth. We’d order more Mbps, but by the time it was commissioned, we’d need more. All links from all providers were always saturated. It was years before we could talk about contention ratios, or offer uncontended bandwidth.
It’s hard to explain just how hard it was to keep up with the compound growth of data use from, literally, zero. You couldn’t just log into a website and click the “up” button. It was all scarcity, logistics and engineering.
Thank you for sharing this. I was born in ‘95—hearing a firsthand account of the early internet in Australia from someone that helped to bring it here is truly special.
It's so long ago that I have to remind myself that I was in the thick of it, in those early days! We ended up wholesaling our satellite service across the whole of the country - as far north as Orange, NSW, and as far west as Kalgoorlie, WA (maybe even further; it's a long time ago). Each ISP would have a satellite ground station, which from memory was in most cases a 2m dish in a cage out the back, or on the roof. It always made the ISP offices look impressive!
I was on the software side; mostly authentication & billing, stuff we had to write ourselves because noone else was doing it at the time.
If you want to understand how it felt, the current wave of generative AI systems feels a lot like those pioneering dialup days. Like the internet, that stuff looks like it's going to change the world - both more slowly than we expect, at first, and then more completely than we can imagine today. It's unbelievable to me that we have high speed internet in our pockets, when I used to dream of having a 1Mb wired connection to my computer.
Running from school in 1994 straight to my local library to beat the rush for a 30 minute allotment of “the internet” on a crappy computer. But it blew my mind, I loved every byte. When I discovered I could download and print guitar tablature others had transcribed, I was in awe. When I discovered I could save images of my favourite bands to a floppy disk, it was magic. And finally when I realised that I too could build websites using HTML… I’m just glad I grew upon that era, and I could build a career, and a life out of something I love.
It's weird how all that stuff and much more is still available now, but no-one is in awe anymore. Of course the same could be said of the pre-internet modern era compared to, say the 1700th century.
I guess human mind really is sensitive only to changes and not to absolute state of things. Makes me wonder how much point there really is in continuously making newer and shinier things since the only thing that happens is that people just get used to the new things and are approximately as happy as they were before.
This is a great observation and fact! I believe paradigm shifts are almost always missed by the masses. Right now we are in a digital revolution that has morphed into a social media shift. Hardware is too fast for most software, but when it catches up, the results could be mountainous.
I'm a senior citizen now who wishes the next paradigm, whatever it will be (Ai?), will happen so I can see it. As for me, happiness is what you make of it, if I want to be happy I have to work for it. When life sucks, I work back to happiness.
For what it's worth it seems alot of younger people I know are are pretty much mortified about what you're excited about. Aspiring artists or writers who are out of jobs and stuff like that. Anyone I've met this year who is working in the film industry, for another example...
it is hard to convey to people how much of our modern world are cultural beliefs and how much it's shifted. So much is commerce and IP now. it's horrible.
I openly gave a talk in my primary school pre-1992 (when we moved) about overcoming copy protections. no one thought i was doing anything wrong. I believe i connected to the internet from our home in AUS sometime around 1994 (when we moved again) or earlier. I can time it because a mortified little me had to find a way to dispose of a picture of a topless lady i accidentally printed out and i rode all the way down to the local shops to throw out in the bin before we moved. I never realised how cutting edge my father was to get us a home connection at the time.
But anyway i digress. back then it was HOPE that this technology would result in free sharing of art and knowledge that everyone wanted to place online at their own expense. Now it's fear that it will cut people out of commercialisation. Such a depressing dystopia we live in, and such a horrible shift as the Web (and subsequently all our societies) were gradually taken over by commercial culture :(
i can't overstress how important that early internet connection was to me as a child growing up in Australia...
We were fortunate enough to have unlimited hours, but living remotely enough to not get broadband until ~2010. Fond memories of downloading Linux Isos and the like from 10pm-7am over the course of weeks/months trying not to tie up the phone line too much.
Getting access to a university's connection was a revelation and many a CDs were burnt of random stuff whilst being amazed that a month long endeavour could be done in minutes
At some point, Bell Canada had a $5/month service called "Internet Call Display", so you had an app that popped up on your computer when there was an incoming call and who it was. You could also set it to auto-disconnect for any in-coming call.
With that, I started logging many hundreds of hours a month on dialup...
I did high school work experience at a university and they were kind enough to give me a Red Hat Linux CD to install at home along with a full printed manual for it. There began the awaking to a whole new world beyond DOS and Windows that I never would have had on dial up.
I remember similar things in the UK, having to pay both a monthly subscription price and a per-minute fee to access the internet.
When I got a broadband connection in the mid nineties it was a double win - no longer did I have to pay by the minute, and when I was online I could still make and receive phone-calls from my landline.
(I sometimes feel nostalgic when watching films in which early dialup was featured, hearing the sound of the modem negotiating it's almost immediately obvious what their baud rate was set to 28.8k or the 56k!)
It was out of necessity because transit was fucking expensive back in the '90s. You had a national monopoly basically with a single cable to the US. Any other transit was satellite and had piss poor latency. Our ISPs had metered traffic (traffic that went out to that external monopoly) and unmetered traffic (stuff that stayed local inside peering points) so of course a lot of our local services grew up around the far cheaper peering points like PIPE, WAIX, SAIX and so on.
> Our ISPs had metered traffic (traffic that went out to that external monopoly)
I remember hitting FTP sites that would check to see if you were in Australia or New Zealand and would bounce you out if you weren't. Some of the earliest form of "geolocation". A popular Linux or w4r3z release would drop and you'd always know you were in for a long night when only the .au servers were replying...and turning away your login.
I always forget that my online experience predates the internet: I occasionally will stumble across old articles or postings where my email address is given in three or four formats because it would be addressed differently depending on whether someone was send me email from BITNET, ARPANET or UUCP. The transition to modern standardized hostname hierarchies and DNS happened in the late 80s which removed some of that awkwardness at least. I had a number of correspondents in Australia back then when their email addresses all ended with .oz (IIRC this remained a TLD in the early internet days before ultimately being superseded by .edu.au). The intrinsic quirkiness of using .oz as their TLD was in itself an indication that Australian internet users were very much in a class of their own.
I worked at UTS from 1991 in the IT department, starting just as NCSCA Mosaic and HTML was killing off Gopher and Turbo Gopher. UTS was the backbone for AARnet and I had a couple of computers with IP numbers that were directly accessible from anywhere. At that time the only people with e-mail addresses were staff from IT and staff and students from the faculties of engineering and science, but some time in the mid to late 1990s Sydney University offered free e-mail to all 50,000 students and all others universities were forced to follow suit (it was a HUGE support load).
Those mid-1990s were spent browsing through the free software archives of (I may have the names wrong) InfoMac and the another at the Berkeley. And general text-based nonsense on Usenet, of course.
At one stage I had a Mac running FileMaker Server 4 hosting then-popular documents about Jaguar (the car) XJ6 and XJ-S maintenance that I'd converted into a database (each sentence was a record) so it was fully searchable. It was up for a couple of years before the university's internal network was moved off the backbone.
As for Telstra buying the internet: most likely they took over the running of the hardware to support the backbone and moved it off-site (ie, out of UTS premises). It was getting expensive. I remember when it happened, our bandwidth dropped overnight and overall quality dropped. IIRC a couple of years later the universities built their own network again.
I was working and studying at Sydney Uni when we joined the net.
I remember pinging Stanford. I had a weird out-of-body feeling as I did it. How could lil ol' me in Australia command machinery in the USA to respond?!
Within weeks, some of us were viewing the X displays of people in Sweden, and grabbing /etc/passwd files from everywhere via open broken ftp servers. Good times!
I already had access to Usenet though; via a Fidonet relay. Thanks Nick Andrew!
I started undergrad at UQ in '93 and had internet via dialup to the uni I'm pretty sure that first year, but if not definitely by '94, and that was available to anyone who wanted it.
Monash was firewalled, but basically everything had a public IP (130.194/16 IIRC).
The modem bank was heavily limited and Yoyo, the student group DEC Alpha which was overloaded and barely firewalled had "Arnie the Modem Terminator", a daemon that would poll the modem banks and if they were full, would terminate Yoyo connections from them (so people would just connect to a school server, and telnet to Yoyo from there. SSH? What's that?)
I was at Charles Sturt University in 95, and have fond memories of starting up Trumpet Winsock on the computer lab's Windows machines and telnetting into a chat mud called Forest (Forrest?), which I'm pretty sure was hosted at UTS. Or was it one of the other Sydney unis?
Anyway, it was insane that you could text chat with these other users in the ether, disconnected from physical reality but still able to message in real time. Certainly shaped my experiences of the early Internet.
G'day! Logged on '94 or '95 at Edith Cowan University in Perth and was blown away to find an episode guide for a fair chunk of The X-Files Season 2, and we'd only seen the first season! We knew when the "cool" episodes were coming up because we could see William B. Davis (The Cigarette-Smoking Man) in the cast list.
I helped start an early (1998) Australian ISP in Sydney (a modem bank connected to an ISDN line) with a Linux 2.0 infrastructure (Slackware…) and Perl based billing system running on Postgres 96. I was 16.
1 USD = 1.55 AUD. All other numbers below are Mbps.
I pay 99 AUD per month for 250 down, 25 up.
If I want 1000 down, 50 up, it's 149 AUD per month.
If I want 1000 down, 400 up, it's 329 AUD per month.
If I want 1000 symmetrical, well I haven't even bothered to check because that's a business service.
Meanwhile I believe people in Zurich can get 10000 down/up for approximately what I pay for 250/25.
Of course, Australia is much larger than Switzerland by area, but that's no excuse for such slow speeds in Sydney. I would much prefer 1G or 10G symmetrical even if it was shaped down once leaving Sydney or Australia.
Actually inet7 in der Schweiz offers 25000 as their standard fibre package. Hardware for this is prohibitively expensive for most but it's great that they are pushing for more adoption by allowing those on a plan to speed up if they want to
Not trying to rub it in further, but approx 900/400 can be had in NZ for about 85AUD even in relatively small rural towns (with higher speed options in more populated areas).
We likely also would have had approximately the same reasonably priced symmetric speeds if Abbott had not aborted the FttP rollout at 5%.
Turnbull also helped to butcher the original FttP NBN horrendously and they spent 400% more than FttP would have cost, to get the much slower network we got lumped with...
i.e the munted results of Murdoch protectionism and "stick it up the opposition" bully Abbott politics.
Australian internet is low quality as the conservative party (confusingly for Americans named the Liberal Party) stopped investing in it and it never recovered.
They also produce good CS research and can't seem to productize any of it; the best known tech employer is the company that makes Jira.
The entire architecture was flawed from the beginning. It was a terrible monopoly plan that actively decided from the outset to use urban connections to subside highly expensive rural ones, essentially a flat tax on those living in metro areas.
Successive governments have enshrined the monopoly status and keep having to make new laws to stop anyone else competing. When a private company is banned from building their own network infrastructure something is very broken. We have taxes on mobile broadband to protect the NBN from 5G, the CEO openly says Starlink is going to eat their lunch and wants taxes on that too so they are less competitive.
New Zealand actually got it right by separating the buildout from the operators.The NBN was an utterly terrible design that was intentionally underquoted and deserves to be mocked by anyone with half a clue about it.
Not to mention that the NBN was already over budget and years behind schedule by the time the Liberals decided to switch to MTM. The whole thing was a disaster from the beginning.
In 2008 we started installing gigabit fibre to every home, but a conservative government got in power in 2013 and stopped it, replacing it with 25mbit VDSL. Ours doesn't work when it's raining!
* Around 1993 as a 15yo I wrote (by post!) to AARNet asking about internet access, they kindly wrote back and referred me to a couple of places: APANA and schoolsNET.
* APANA, the Australian Public Access Networking Association, was how 15yo me got UUCP, and eventually 2.4kbps SLIP, access circa 1993. It had all the good things small communities have and many people from that time went on to do very interesting things (e.g. Mark Delany).
* schoolsNET was an interesting ISP I ended up working for, bringing internet access to secondary education way before it was common in Australia.
* Also, don't forget Trumpet Winsock: before Windows 95, it was pretty much the way to connect Windows 3.x systems to IP networks.
* Tangentially related, but don't forget the first port of UNIX was done at the University of Wollongong. Driving past it the other day I was reminded of this.
1994, I was trying to get internet, and in a hurry, in Melbourne. Found an ISP in Box Hill, and got down there and paid them my first month in cash, and they walked me into the back office, opened up a cabinet, logged into a Linux console, and adduser'ed me, and then added me to a ppp group. Done.
> Also, don't forget Trumpet Winsock: before Windows 95, it was pretty much the way to connect Windows 3.x systems to IP networks.
I was wondering around somewhere, it may have been Sydney or it may have been somewhere in Tasmania, in 2007 and was stunned to discover the Trumpet Winsock office. I took a photo.
a case in the Federal and High Courts of Australia between members of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and other movie and television studios and iiNet, Australia's third-largest Internet service provider (ISP) at the time.
Landmark Australian copyright case.
Hollywood lost, Australians were permitted to pirate with no oversight required by their ISP's
The internet took off in aus due to social networks. The popular ones were all the cc field of email. Many had work addresses first before deciding they wanted that at home. Hotmail worked ok too. There were a lot of weaknesses to that unstructured and decentralised approach to social networks but also something to be said for it that has been lost.
I felt this article was all over the place and basically very weak coming from an academic. It didn't tackle cultural histories, didn't mention BBSs, X.25 or ISDN, didn't tackle issues of politicisation such as censorship, infrastructure privatisation, etc. Few hard numbers or any recognition of the technical issues being overcome. Bandwidth over POTS. Circuit vs. packet switched networks. Decentralisation. Storage media evolution and volumes. The death of Australian manufacturing. If only the Powerhouse Museum wasn't a political football, perhaps we could get a decent social history done.
I was hoping for some mention of OzEmail (largest mail service in the southern hemisphere at the time. My firm acquired the company December 1998. The 90s were indeed golden years.
Further to my top-level comment mentioning OzEmail above...
When I started there in Feb 1999, the highly-publicised acquisition by MCI WorldCom had just been completed and staff with earlier employee stock allocations were receiving their payouts.
At some point the signage out the front was changed to UUNet, and that was the brand promoted to Australian business customers. A major project was undertaken to transition customers over to UUNet's "DAN" (Dial Access Network).
Sadly that was the beginning of the end for the OzEmail brand. UUNet soon set about trying to offload the OzEmail consumer-focused business whilst also trying to make such a deal a bigger wholesale contract for use of the DAN [1].
Those attempted sales in 2000 didn't eventuate, then with the bankruptcy of MCI WorldCom, everything there just went into a holding pattern; there was no solid strategy or investment to keep growing the customer base and embrace the consumer broadband era that started taking off in 2001 (I'd moved over to another ISP that was very early to market with ADSL offerings to small business then consumers, and we watched on with bemusement as OzEmail just seemed largely dormant).
Meanwhile, the little-known Perth-based ISP iiNet moved very aggressively to capture the consumer ADSL market, and blew us all out of the water in that segment.
iiNet acquired OzEmail in 2005 [2], for about a third of the best offer price in 2000. I once heard iiNet named conference rooms after all the companies they'd acquired, so if that's still true, that's about all that's left of the OzEmail brand, along with a few old email addresses you occasionally see in the wild.
It's a shame; it was such a strong brand and presence in the Australian internet scene in the mid-late 90s, which is why I was so excited to be able to work there.
Another interesting book about the microcosm of tech is the book Gaming the Iron Curtain. It's about the Czech Republic before the velvet revolution, so not about the Internet, but fascinating how people there used technology despite their constraints.
> Given current concerns about the state of the internet – from the power of large digital platforms to the proliferation of disinformation
The word 'disinformation' has become a trigger word for me. Whenever I come across it, I instantly feel hostility towards the writer or speaker. It's a disingenuous word to use because it's not possible to say what is true or false with much accuracy. It's a word which is used by people who want to oppress others by silencing them.
Just 6 years later, when I started university (in a course I didn't much care for as no profession or career seemed of much interest), as I sat at a computer lab PC and started perusing the Windows 3.11 desktop, I saw the Netscape icon, clicked on it, started browsing - finding music lyrics and chat boards, and sporting results and transgressive humour, and thought "OK, this is exciting". Pretty soon I was building webpages and thinking about how to turn this into a career.
The first internet-related job I got was for OzEmail, in 1999, in the building that was previously occupied by corporate-focused ISP Access One (OzEmail had acquired it from Solution6). Access One had been founded by Labtam, a company that was formed in 1972 making/importing scientific instruments, then made PCs in the 80s, then in 1989 developed a world-first RISC-based X terminal and started exporting it globally [1][2]. Once I was chatting with a guy I'd gotten to know at OzEmail, who'd started as an Access One phone support rep then learned about Cisco routers and soon became a network engineer, and he pointed into the server room at the rack where he'd installed the first Yahoo mirror in Australia. All this was going on in a nondescript light-industrial area of Braeside in outer south-eastern Melbourne. There was still a Labtam office in that street when I worked at OzEmail, and old X terminals lying around the office. They let me take one home once and I tried to connect it up to my home network. I didn't get very far, but it was a bit of fun. These days I live past Braeside and occasionally drive down that road and reminisce, lamenting that the people working for the construction and import/export companies occupying those buildings now would have little knowledge or care for what feats of innovation and commerce that had happened there in decades past.
I once had to email Robert Elz in order to apply for a .org.au domain name for a community group I was in. He was cranky that my DNS records weren't set up right, but we got there eventually (he must have been extremely busy and it could often take a long time to get a response; someone once told me gifts of good Scotch could help move things along). I've often wondered what he thought of the way control of the .au tld was given to Melbourne IT, and privatised in a way that enriched the University and also established clients of their IPO underwriters, JB Were. It really didn't seem much in the spirit of the early internet, of which he was such a champion.
Sometimes I think it would be fun to do a bunch of interviews with the people making everything happen back then and make a podcast or video series about it. It was such an exciting time and I feel lucky to have been there when it was just taking off. I'd love to help document it for posterity. (If anybody reading this happens to know of anyone who was at Labtam in the early 90s I'd love an intro.)
[1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sun_endorses_labtams_x_ter...
[2] https://www.afr.com/politics/labtam-receivership-after-slow-...