How Australians made the early internet their own
My parents would have the ABC news on at home each night, and I&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;that seems important&quot;.<p>Just 6 years later, when I started university (in a course I didn&#x27;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 &quot;OK, this is exciting&quot;. Pretty soon I was building webpages and thinking about how to turn this into a career.<p>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&#x2F;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&#x27;d gotten to know at OzEmail, who&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t seem much in the spirit of the early internet, of which he was such a champion.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;d love an intro.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techmonitor.ai&#x2F;technology&#x2F;sun_endorses_labtams_x_terminals_motif_from_down_under" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techmonitor.ai&#x2F;technology&#x2F;sun_endorses_labtams_x_ter...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afr.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;labtam-receivership-after-slow-payments-19900618-k3yiy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afr.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;labtam-receivership-after-slow-...</a>