[HN Gopher] How Australians made the early internet their own ___________________________________________________________________ How Australians made the early internet their own Author : throwaway167 Score : 76 points Date : 2023-09-22 16:04 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (theconversation.com) (TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com) | xrd wrote: | 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. | chrisrickard wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | Scoundreller wrote: | 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... | cube00 wrote: | 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. | stevekemp wrote: | 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!) | vjk800 wrote: | 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. | cube00 wrote: | _Everything is amazing and nobody is happy._ | bloomingeek wrote: | 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. | jamal-kumar wrote: | 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... | ACow_Adonis wrote: | 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... | theobromananda wrote: | I agree, culture has been colonised and turned into | capital. It is bleak. I often miss the times before | everything was connected. | trh0awayman wrote: | 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. | MrVandemar wrote: | 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 wrote: | Another Perthonality here :-P | emunday_bbc wrote: | I am extremely disappointed by the distinct lack of "C" words | in the replies to this comment... We seem to be forgetting our | national identity. | werrett wrote: | We all got jobs in comp security when we turned 20 ;) | taspeotis wrote: | Australian here. | TMWNN wrote: | .-_|\ / \ Perth ->*.--._/ | v <- Tasmania | nsonha wrote: | Ok but where is that Sydney city? | retrac wrote: | On the southeastern / | gonzo41 wrote: | Hi from Tassie. | IntelMiner wrote: | As someone from Adelaide originally, us being a dot on the | map is still pretty accurate | keepamovin wrote: | hey! aussie here | bradrn wrote: | Me too! | lukeh wrote: | 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. | tomhoward wrote: | 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 a company called 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 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-... | timcederman wrote: | I was reading the comment, thinking "this sounds like someone I | know", and then saw the username - hi Tom! :) | interfixus wrote: | 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. | SulphurCrested wrote: | 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. | Scoundreller wrote: | Any truth to early Australian usenet access just being a | 10mb tape drive being mailed around (either internally, or | internationally?) | SulphurCrested wrote: | 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. | gumby wrote: | > I remember the news item reporting the establishment of that | first Internet connection to Australia, into Melbourne | University in 1989. | | One of the reasons I don't live in Melbourne any more but long | lived in Palo Alto is that in 1989 I had non-dialup Internet | service _in my home_. | | (Though more and more I miss Melbourne). | somishere wrote: | 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. | LAC-Tech wrote: | Crazy to think that when Colin Fidge (independently) invented | vector clocks in 1988, Australia didn't even have internet. | jazzyjackson wrote: | 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 | harry8 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | aaron695 wrote: | [dead] | doctor_eval wrote: | > 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. | Scoundreller wrote: | Curious what year this would have been? Cool to learn that | satellite backhaul was viable. | | What did Telstra have/use as offshore transit before that first | big cable? | doctor_eval wrote: | 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. | bjt12345 wrote: | Sadly, Australia missed great many opportunities when it came to | the internet. | dkdbejwi383 wrote: | Do you care to elaborate? | DougMerritt wrote: | 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] | shric wrote: | I live in the Sydney Central Business District. | | 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. | ClassyJacket wrote: | 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! | astrange wrote: | 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. | thisiswater wrote: | 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. | Veliladon wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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." | nickdothutton wrote: | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-24 23:01 UTC)