[LINK] RFC: The Web in Oz, 1992-94

[Tom Worthington]

On 14/12/11 16:22, Roger Clarke wrote:
> I'm trying to finalise my long-intended history of the first couple
> of years of 'the Web in Oz' ...

The Canberra Branch of the Australian Computer Society set up a dial up 
service for members in 1993. This was expanded to a national service in 
1995. It was the intuitive of Mr. Peter Talty, Chairman of the ACS 
Canberra Branch. Details are in "The ACS-link Project - a Case Study", 
Peter Talty BA MACS, ACS Canberra Branch Conference: MULITNET'95: 
http://www.tomw.net.au/cn95pt1.html

This provided such miraculous services as:

* Easy-to-use menu access to thousands of "Gopher" information services,
* On-line searches of millions of documents using the Wide Area 
Information Service,
* Access to millions of files through File Transfer Protocol,
* Interactive "Telnet" access to tens of thousands of computer services.

See the launch announcement: http://www.tomw.net.au/irc/irc12c.html

You will note no mention of the web.

This was later replaced with a national service "ACS-link": 
http://groups.google.com/group/aus.general/browse_thread/thread/ab58eed87421ac0b/f621ebd60d318b9a?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22australian+computer+society%22+dialup+canberra&pli=1

ACS-link (Australian Computer Society Inc.)
Ph: (02) 211 5855
Fx: (02) 281 1208
E-mail: i... at acs.org.au
Features: e-mail, conferencing, full range Internet services, ACS 
Information services (detailed libraries
incl. IT Practitioners Handbook) SLIP, PPP, IRC, Messenger;
Costs: Once only service connection fee of $50 for ACS members only (5 
hours peak time usage or 10 hours non-peak usage free of network charges).

This service was important as it exposed pubic servants in Canberra, and 
IT professionals across Australia, to the practicalities of the 
Internet. Myself and other ACS members demonstrated the Internet and the 
web at ACS meetings and conferences.

As an example, on 21 July 1994 I presented my first web page to the 
Canberra branch meeting, "HI-TECH TOURIST ON THE EUROPEAN INFORMATION 
HIGHWAY: and Recent Developments on the Global Information 
Infrastructure": http://www.tomw.net.au/hitech.html

You will notice my web pages lacked back-links from the subsidiary 
pages, as I did not know how to do them at the time. Later I went on a 
web course at the ANU run by Tony Barry and with that knowledge set up 
the Defence department's home page: 
http://www.acs.org.au/president/1998/past/dodweb.htm

I created official departmental files for Internet and web policy at the 
Defence Department in the mid 1990s and placed copies of all the 
paperwork from internal and inter-departmental meetings I attended on 
the topics on file (with folio numbers on each page). Assuming these 
have not been destroyed, they should now be available for research 
purposes: http://www.defence.gov.au/foi/contacts.htm


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/