[HN Gopher] How Australians made the early internet their own
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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.
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