I worked at UTS from 1991 in the IT department, starting just as NCSCA Mosaic and HTML was killing off Gopher and Turbo Gopher. UTS was the backbone for AARnet and I had a couple of computers with IP numbers that were directly accessible from anywhere. At that time the only people with e-mail addresses were staff from IT and staff and students from the faculties of engineering and science, but some time in the mid to late 1990s Sydney University offered free e-mail to all 50,000 students and all others universities were forced to follow suit (it was a HUGE support load).
Those mid-1990s were spent browsing through the free software archives of (I may have the names wrong) InfoMac and the another at the Berkeley. And general text-based nonsense on Usenet, of course.
At one stage I had a Mac running FileMaker Server 4 hosting then-popular documents about Jaguar (the car) XJ6 and XJ-S maintenance that I'd converted into a database (each sentence was a record) so it was fully searchable. It was up for a couple of years before the university's internal network was moved off the backbone.
As for Telstra buying the internet: most likely they took over the running of the hardware to support the backbone and moved it off-site (ie, out of UTS premises). It was getting expensive. I remember when it happened, our bandwidth dropped overnight and overall quality dropped. IIRC a couple of years later the universities built their own network again.
I was working and studying at Sydney Uni when we joined the net.
I remember pinging Stanford. I had a weird out-of-body feeling as I did it. How could lil ol' me in Australia command machinery in the USA to respond?!
Within weeks, some of us were viewing the X displays of people in Sweden, and grabbing /etc/passwd files from everywhere via open broken ftp servers. Good times!
I already had access to Usenet though; via a Fidonet relay. Thanks Nick Andrew!
I started undergrad at UQ in '93 and had internet via dialup to the uni I'm pretty sure that first year, but if not definitely by '94, and that was available to anyone who wanted it.
Monash was firewalled, but basically everything had a public IP (130.194/16 IIRC).
The modem bank was heavily limited and Yoyo, the student group DEC Alpha which was overloaded and barely firewalled had "Arnie the Modem Terminator", a daemon that would poll the modem banks and if they were full, would terminate Yoyo connections from them (so people would just connect to a school server, and telnet to Yoyo from there. SSH? What's that?)
I was at Charles Sturt University in 95, and have fond memories of starting up Trumpet Winsock on the computer lab's Windows machines and telnetting into a chat mud called Forest (Forrest?), which I'm pretty sure was hosted at UTS. Or was it one of the other Sydney unis?
Anyway, it was insane that you could text chat with these other users in the ether, disconnected from physical reality but still able to message in real time. Certainly shaped my experiences of the early Internet.
Those mid-1990s were spent browsing through the free software archives of (I may have the names wrong) InfoMac and the another at the Berkeley. And general text-based nonsense on Usenet, of course.
At one stage I had a Mac running FileMaker Server 4 hosting then-popular documents about Jaguar (the car) XJ6 and XJ-S maintenance that I'd converted into a database (each sentence was a record) so it was fully searchable. It was up for a couple of years before the university's internal network was moved off the backbone.
As for Telstra buying the internet: most likely they took over the running of the hardware to support the backbone and moved it off-site (ie, out of UTS premises). It was getting expensive. I remember when it happened, our bandwidth dropped overnight and overall quality dropped. IIRC a couple of years later the universities built their own network again.