The hive mind is usually buzzing with the latest developments, trends, and talk of the way forward. Faster connections, bigger downloads, smarter software. It is rare to look backwards at where the internet came from.
In Australia, it was the evening of June 23, 1989, when a connection between a computer at the University of Melbourne and another at the University of Hawaii was established. The speed was 56 kbps.
Now, 40 years after the first computer networks and 20 years after Australia joined what would become the global web, the Australian Academic Research Network (AARNet) has looked back at how it all began. A book detailing 20 years of the internet in Australia has been published, exploring recent history and bringing up nostalgia for those of us who remember being excited about Netscape Navigator.
While there had been computer networks in Australia since CSIRONet in 1963, after the link to the United States and with funding from universities the internet was effectively AARNet in the early days. In 1995 Telstra took over those duties, and the network went back to its core role with academic institutions. Now, its capacity is 200,000 times bigger than the original link to Hawaii and there are 39 shareholder institutions, including the nation's largest universities.
AARNet chief executive officer Chris Hancock said it was important to reflect on how far technology had come in such a short time.
''In following the history of it, it was down to individuals to be able to make convincing arguments about how valuable this whole project will be, and that is a leap of faith. Those sorts of leaps of faith are difficult, they're difficult for governments and they're difficult for universities,'' he says.
The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee invested $247,000 to create a national network, but AARNet soon found its capacity reached. Traffic volume doubled every eight months, and the hardware struggled to keep up. But the universities weren't to know what they were buying into.
''Back then it was a big commitment in something that probably a lot of them really didn't understand or believe in, and nor had their been any evidence of it other than the US were off and running,'' Hancock says.
The arrival of the personal computer in 1989 coincided with the internet, and contributed to demand. In two years, AARNet was connected to 40,000 computers.
Hancock says users wanted to be part of the ''bigger, wider world'' and technology was a key driver.
Those running the network from Canberra were fairly liberal with their interpretation of eligible institutions that could subscribe, allowing businesses to feed data to offices around the world. Some were working to create a national network, and Hancock says the pioneering spirit was about more than meeting the needs of researchers.
''There was almost a desperation in some ways to realise all of a sudden what this could do, and how we could benefit from it. And therefore how can we corral as many enthusiastic people as possible to be able to drive an outcome?
''If you look at some of the trailblazers or the early pioneers, it's interesting going back in history, the same sorts of things are happening today. In universities, it's that willingness to take a risk, to take a punt, to think about the future not just next quarter's results, to think about what this will mean for the end users in the long-term.''
It is impossible to say how the internet would have developed in Australia had it started in commercial hands. Hancock, who has a business background, says there would have been different priorities and competing interests.
''The experimental environment really allowed it to flourish,'' he says.
''Whether it would have been any different with respect to business, who will ever know?''
Competition existed between researchers and organisations in those days, but he says collaboration won out.
Since Telstra took on the 600,000 customers and management of the network, AARNet has returned to its roots. It has continued building its capacity, now with a 10gbps backbone that features large international collaborations.
Much of what happens on the network today still does not happen in the commercial world, and could not occur on current commercial networks. Hancock says there's a need to stay at the forefront and provide value.
''Say, when astronomers wanted one gigabit we had to be ready to deliver that,'' he says.
''Now they're wanting 10 gigabits we've been ready to deliver that. There will come a day when they will want 100GB, we'll have to be ready to deliver that. Staying ahead of the curve is probably the second sort of threat or concern.''
Just as the impact of the internet on society is large and evolving, Hancock finds it hard to quantify just how important the network has been.
''I'm sure there's been a huge effect for the wider community, [firstly] in that the commercial market developed out of it so there wouldn't have been an internet without it,'' he says.
''The second is that in the research that's been done, cutting edge developments that have been done, [when we've] developed wireless technologies or cured disease or whatever that might be ...
''Other than that, it's of direct benefit to the researchers and educators themselves, in how they've been able to do things. That's not the general community, that's not 90 per cent of people at 100mbps, but it's certainly a leading group that couldn't do their science, research or education without AARNet.''
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