Andrew Peel in the Historical Technology room at the University of Melbourne this week. Credit:Simon Schluter Geoff Huston, who was network manager at Canberra's Australian National University, had been lobbying the council of university vice-chancellors to fund the construction of a university network. Now chief scientist at the regional internet registry body internet addressing organisation APNIC, Huston told Fairfax Media this week Melbourne pipped Sydney for the honour of first connection because the Victorian capital was a marginally cheaper location to route internet traffic to far-flung cities such as Perth and Darwin. "We needed to connect capital cities and regional locations, such as Townsville, Rockhampton, Brisbane, Armidale, etc, and we punched a Telecom Australia price list into an Excel spreadsheet to work out what kind of network would be acceptable in terms of quality but also the cheapest," Huston said. "We reverse engineered telco tariffs." Eventually backed by a $350,000 grant from the Australian Research Council (a negotiation 15 months in the making) Huston and his colleague Peter Elford connected the country, and in three weeks in May 1990 visited 10 CSIRO sites and 38 university campuses, including Curtin University in Perth and Central University in Rockhampton. The were building the AARNet research network.

Media shy: Robert Elz's cartoon, instead of a photograph, adorned a staff board at the University of Melbourne in 1996. Credit:Belinda Pratten "It was like we were building the railroads, with a steam engine under one arm, track under the other, and we just laid it out as we went along," Huston said. "We just appeared on a campus, asked 'where's your network?', plugged 'a' into 'b' and said 'congrats your world is changed. You no longer need to pay 20¢ a call, there's just one big bill, go knock yourselves out'." However, AARNet became a victim of its own success when the huge demand saw it regularly double capacity - being delivered by Telecom Australia's international arm, the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) - arousing the ire of NASA. "They said, 'you can grow as big as you like but you'll need to pay both ends'," he said of NASA. Australian businesses also wanted a slice of the action and by 1995 AARNet boasted 300 commercial customers, including the ABC, 50 small ISPs, and five different business units within Telstra.

"[The five different business units within Telstra] couldn't agree on a single connection," Huston said. The research exercise had become, in essence, an internet service provider. AARNet was OTC's biggest customer - with its 3 megabits per second connection trumping even NASA's 500 kbps link. This troubled the monopoly provider because there would be a huge hole in its revenues if AARNet decided to take its business elsewhere. According to Huston, OTC told AARNet, "We don't like you being a customer, you're too big. The problem is you can walk away with your money anytime you want, which would ruin us," AARNet chose the latter, selling out for "the princely sum" of $3 million, Huston said, but the affair was short-lived. The academic institutions left Telstra to join upstart Optus, he said.

In 2012, Huston was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, while last year Robert Elz was inducted into the Pearcey Hall of Fame, which recognises achievements by Australian technology practitioners. Andrew Peel, a technician at Melbourne University at the time, said that Elz's "sage-like" presence laid the foundations which allowed the internet to flourish in Australia. "He made a whole lot of wise decisions about the governance framework and how things should be set up and run," Peel said. "[The expansion of the internet] went reasonably smoothly because of a lot of the decisions Robert made." "At the time we didn't realise that it was going to turn into some huge world-changing thing, but we knew that it was pretty cool and wondered how we managed without it beforehand." Wayne Fitzsimmons, chairman of the Pearcey Foundation, said that Robert was a "true Aussie pioneer that got on with the job."

"On the one hand you could say that someobdy was going to do it but Robert decided this was important and took the intiative to start a service we now take for granted," Fitzsimmons said. "But for him who knows how much early or later it would've been. "He wasn't seeking any fame or fortune. He didn't get paid. He was the retiring type, the guy around the corner you never see."