[gary]

Before the Internet in Australia, there will be those of us who remember
using ACSnet which grew out of the work of people like Bob Kummerfeld
and Piers Lauder at Sydney Uni and which connected a handful of Australian
universities that were running UNIX at the time, mainly on PDP-11's and later VAX's.
UNSW, The University of Wollongong and Sydney University all played instrumental
parts in the early development and adoption of UNIX with close ties to Bell Labs
in New Jersey.

ACSnet was a store and forward messaging system and though we could email
colleagues at Sydney from UNSW, email arrived in bulk a few times a day.
Some time around the early 80's we got the first links to the U.S. and initially it was
a big deal that we could exchange email with academic colleagues in the States.
I still had one of the old .oz.au email addresses up until the mid 90's.

Some time during the mid 80's I recollect a microwave link being set up between
Sydney Uni and UNSW and gradually the connections became faster and more
sophisticated.

I vividly remember being a helping hand helping pull the first UNSW Ethernet cable
through the false ceiling of the third floor of the School of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science at UNSW. It was the original "thick" style coax,
with blue sheathing as I recollect and I remember Peter Ivanov who administered
the computer room showing me one of the line terminators and saying something
like "do you believe they charge 100 bucks for these things". I remember
the Ethernet card installed in the VAX was this physically huge thing,
I remember it as something that looked like 12 inches square!

I'd be curious as to how many others on IIS were early users of ACSnet in the
70's and 80's?

Best Regards

Gary Kopff
Mt Kuring-Gai