10 ms·

How Australians made the early internet their own

109 points by throwaway167 3y ago

dhosek 3y ago
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their email addresses all ended with .oz (IIRC this remained a TLD in the early internet days before ultimately being superseded by .edu.au).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.
jongjong 3y ago
> 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.
defrost 3y ago
Sadly few mentions of major milestones in Australian pwnage. To throw up just two, of many, * WANK (computer worm) a computer worm that attacked DEC VMS computers in 1989 over the DECnet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WANK_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WANK_(computer_worm) * Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet... https://wilmap.stanford.edu/entries/high-court-australia-roadshow-films-pty-ltd-v-iinet-limited-2012-hca-16-april-20-2012 https://wilmap.stanford.edu/entries/high-court-australia-roa... https://theconversation.com/iinets-hollywood-ending-what-does-its-court-victory-mean-for-copyright-law-6577 https://theconversation.com/iinets-hollywood-ending-what-doe...
contingencies 3y ago
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.
tomhoward 3y ago
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.) [1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sun_endorses_labtams_x_terminals_motif_from_down_under https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sun_endorses_labtams_x_ter... [2] https://www.afr.com/politics/labtam-receivership-after-slow-payments-19900618-k3yiy https://www.afr.com/politics/labtam-receivership-after-slow-...
chrisrickard 3y ago
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.
- cube00 3y ago
  How I dodged getting a virus downloading on the shared library computers and bringing those floppies home I'll never know. We only had 8 hours a month of dial up so I still had to frequent the library to get my fix. We also had to carefully consider when we would dial in because that was 25 cents a pop for the phone call. Hours spent writing and read mail and newsgroups offline and one "send and receive" when you were online to save those precious hours.
  - mnahkies 3y ago
    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
    - cube00 3y ago
      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.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      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...
trh0awayman 3y ago
The internet underground in the late 90s/early 2000s was absolutely full of Australians. I feel like I hardly encounter them anymore, for some reason.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  hey! aussie here
  - bradrn 3y ago
    Me too!
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  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. The X-Files is gone, but I'm still here. :-)
  - senectus1 3y ago
    Another Perthonality here :-P
- TMWNN 3y ago
  .-_|\ / \ Perth ->*.--._/ v <- Tasmania
  - nsonha 3y ago
    Ok but where is that Sydney city?
    - retrac 3y ago
      On the southeastern /
Veliladon 3y ago
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.
- techsupporter 3y ago
  > 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. It reminds me of the joke poem: "A host is a host from coast to coast, and nobody talks to a host that's close, unless the host that isn't close is busy, hung, or dead."
bjt12345 3y ago
Sadly, Australia missed great many opportunities when it came to the internet.
- dkdbejwi383 3y ago
  Do you care to elaborate?
  - DougMerritt 3y ago
    They very likely will not elaborate, since I see that since 2018 they've made only about a dozen comments, 3 of which were nothing but "."
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - ClassyJacket 3y ago
    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!
    - shric 3y ago
      The joke is I have gigabit fibre (Sydney CBD), but it's $329/month for 1000/400.
  - thisiswater 3y ago
    The rollout of the national fibre network, "NBN", was eaten alive by politicking and conflicted interests. C.f.: Renewable energy. Neoliberalism has done/is doing terrible things to the public services in this country.
  - astrange 3y ago
    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.
xrd 3y ago
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.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
nickdothutton 3y ago
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.
- tomhoward 3y ago
  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. [1] https://archive.md/ci8Ln https://archive.md/ci8Ln [2] https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20050215/pdf/3pqz6tgz0mn26.pdf https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20050215/pdf/3pqz6tg...
harry8 3y ago
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.
foobarbazetc 3y ago
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. The early Australian internet was a lot of fun.
doctor_eval 3y ago
> 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.
- ggm 3y ago
  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.
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    > Stressful at the time, better memories now 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.
lukeh 3y ago
A few other data points: * 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.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  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.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  > 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.
- Smoosh 3y ago
  I also went through APANA for my primal internet access, specifically tyndale.apana.org.au. Wow, that was a long time ago.
foobar1962 3y ago
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.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  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?)
- emmelaich 3y ago
  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!
tomhoward 3y ago
Another post on the front page now has reminded me of an icon whose roots go back to the Australian internet scene of the late 90s: Fastmail [1]. Co-founder Jeremy Howard is now a leading educator on AI, as seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631089 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail

109 points by throwaway167 3y ago

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.

jongjong 3y ago

> 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.

defrost 3y ago

Sadly few mentions of major milestones in Australian pwnage. To throw up just two, of many, * WANK (computer worm) a computer worm that attacked DEC VMS computers in 1989 over the DECnet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WANK_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WANK_(computer_worm) * Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet... https://wilmap.stanford.edu/entries/high-court-australia-roadshow-films-pty-ltd-v-iinet-limited-2012-hca-16-april-20-2012 https://wilmap.stanford.edu/entries/high-court-australia-roa... https://theconversation.com/iinets-hollywood-ending-what-does-its-court-victory-mean-for-copyright-law-6577 https://theconversation.com/iinets-hollywood-ending-what-doe...

contingencies 3y ago

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.

tomhoward 3y ago

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.) [1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sun_endorses_labtams_x_terminals_motif_from_down_under https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sun_endorses_labtams_x_ter... [2] https://www.afr.com/politics/labtam-receivership-after-slow-payments-19900618-k3yiy https://www.afr.com/politics/labtam-receivership-after-slow-...

chrisrickard 3y ago

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.

cube00 3y ago
How I dodged getting a virus downloading on the shared library computers and bringing those floppies home I'll never know. We only had 8 hours a month of dial up so I still had to frequent the library to get my fix. We also had to carefully consider when we would dial in because that was 25 cents a pop for the phone call. Hours spent writing and read mail and newsgroups offline and one "send and receive" when you were online to save those precious hours.
- mnahkies 3y ago
  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
  - cube00 3y ago
    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.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    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...

trh0awayman 3y ago

The internet underground in the late 90s/early 2000s was absolutely full of Australians. I feel like I hardly encounter them anymore, for some reason.

keepamovin 3y ago
hey! aussie here
- bradrn 3y ago
  Me too!
MrVandemar 3y ago
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. The X-Files is gone, but I'm still here. :-)
- senectus1 3y ago
  Another Perthonality here :-P
TMWNN 3y ago
.-_|\ / \ Perth ->*.--._/ v <- Tasmania
- nsonha 3y ago
  Ok but where is that Sydney city?
  - retrac 3y ago
    On the southeastern /

Veliladon 3y ago

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.

techsupporter 3y ago
> 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. It reminds me of the joke poem: "A host is a host from coast to coast, and nobody talks to a host that's close, unless the host that isn't close is busy, hung, or dead."

bjt12345 3y ago

Sadly, Australia missed great many opportunities when it came to the internet.

dkdbejwi383 3y ago
Do you care to elaborate?
- DougMerritt 3y ago
  They very likely will not elaborate, since I see that since 2018 they've made only about a dozen comments, 3 of which were nothing but "."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ClassyJacket 3y ago
  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!
  - shric 3y ago
    The joke is I have gigabit fibre (Sydney CBD), but it's $329/month for 1000/400.
- thisiswater 3y ago
  The rollout of the national fibre network, "NBN", was eaten alive by politicking and conflicted interests. C.f.: Renewable energy. Neoliberalism has done/is doing terrible things to the public services in this country.
- astrange 3y ago
  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.

xrd 3y ago

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.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

nickdothutton 3y ago

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.

tomhoward 3y ago
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. [1] https://archive.md/ci8Ln https://archive.md/ci8Ln [2] https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20050215/pdf/3pqz6tgz0mn26.pdf https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20050215/pdf/3pqz6tg...

harry8 3y ago

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.

foobarbazetc 3y ago

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. The early Australian internet was a lot of fun.

doctor_eval 3y ago

> 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.

ggm 3y ago
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.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  > Stressful at the time, better memories now 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.

lukeh 3y ago

A few other data points: * 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.

FireBeyond 3y ago
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.
MrVandemar 3y ago
> 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.
Smoosh 3y ago
I also went through APANA for my primal internet access, specifically tyndale.apana.org.au. Wow, that was a long time ago.

foobar1962 3y ago

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.

FireBeyond 3y ago
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?)
emmelaich 3y ago
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!

tomhoward 3y ago

Another post on the front page now has reminded me of an icon whose roots go back to the Australian internet scene of the late 90s: Fastmail [1]. Co-founder Jeremy Howard is now a leading educator on AI, as seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631089 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail