Kevin Robert Elz, often referred to in computing circles as Robert Elz, or simply kre, is a computer programmer and a pioneer in connecting Australia to the Internet, and more recently, in connecting Thailand.
Some of his achievements include developing a number of important Internet RFC documents, [1] helping connect Australia to the world-wide Internet, [2] developing the internet-based research network within Australia, and operating the .au domain registry from 1986 through to the late 1990s. [3] He also managed the aus.* Usenet hierarchy from its inception in the 1980s until the mid-1990s. [4] In 1979 he co-founded the Australian Computer Science network (ACSnet) and in 1989 with Torben Nielsen of the University of Hawaiʻi he completed the connection work that brought the internet to Australia, which enabled AARNet to develop soon after. [5]
He is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, [6] where for some years he worked in the Computer Science department.
An ardent cricket fan, Elz is also credited for pioneering online text commentary for cricket matches. [7] [8]
Having previously lived and worked in Melbourne for many years, he currently lives in Hat Yai, Songkhla, Thailand, [9] where he is an honorary lecturer in the Computer Engineering Department of the Prince of Songkla University. [10]
As the architect of the early domain-name eligibility criteria for ".com.au", Elz was largely responsible for Australia's not experiencing a domain name gold rush in the mid-1990s. The eligibility policy required a direct connection between a company's official name and its domain name, in contrast to the strictly first-come-first-served policy of the .com registry. [11]
Elz was, however, criticised during his tenure, as domain name applications often took many months to be examined, despite the commercialisation of the Internet and customer demands for quick turnaround times. In 1990, Elz delegated responsibility for the ".gov.au" and ".edu.au" domains to Geoff Huston at the Australian National University. Elz handed the operation of ".com.au" to Melbourne IT in 1996. Responsibility for other domains was transferred to auDA in 2001. [11]
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
Telecommunications in Australia refers to communication in Australia through electronic means, using devices such as telephone, television, radio or computer, and services such as the telephony and broadband networks. Telecommunications have always been important in Australia given the "tyranny of distance" with a dispersed population. Governments have driven telecommunication development and have a key role in its regulation.
The term netizen is a portmanteau of the English words internet and citizen, as in a "citizen of the net" or "net citizen". It describes a person actively involved in online communities or the Internet in general.
Mary Ann Horton, is a Usenet and Internet pioneer. Horton contributed to Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including the vi editor and terminfo database, created the first email binary attachment tool uuencode, and led the growth of Usenet in the 1980s.
The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET, resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.
.au is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia. It was created on 5 March 1986. Domain name policy is managed by .au Domain Administration (auDA). As of July 2018, the registry is operated by Afilias.
MHSnet is a store-and-forward Message Handling System for wide area networks. MHSnet and its precursor, SUNIII, were used to implement the Australian Computer Science network, commonly known as ACSnet, which connected Australia's Universities to each other and to ARPANET.
AARNet provides Internet services to the Australian education and research communities and their research partners.
Universities Australia is an organisation founded in Sydney in May 1920, which attempts to advance higher education through voluntary, cooperative and coordinated action. After being based for a time in both Sydney and Melbourne, its offices relocated to Canberra in 1966. It is a private company whose members are Australia's 39 universities. The universities are represented by their vice-chancellors.
Webcentral, formerly known as Melbourne IT Group, is an Australian digital services provider. It is a publicly-traded company that was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999. It provides internet domain registration, email/office applications, cloud hosting, cloud services, 5G networks, managed services, IT services, DevOps security, and digital marketing. Founded in 1996, it was the first Australian domain name registrar.
The International Packet Switched Service (IPSS) was the first international and commercial packet switching network. It was created in 1978 by a collaboration between Britain's Post Office Telecommunications, and the United States' Western Union International and Tymnet.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Internet.
Tom Truscott is an American computer scientist best known for creating Usenet with Jim Ellis, when both were graduate students at Duke University. He is also a member of ACM, IEEE, and Sigma Xi. One of his first endeavors into computers was writing a computer chess program and then later working on a global optimizer for C at Bell Labs. This computer chess program competed in multiple computer chess tournaments such as the Toronto chess tournament in 1977 and the Linz tournament in 1980. Today, Truscott works on tools that analyze software as a software developer for the SAS Institute.
Internet in Australia first became available on a permanent basis to universities in Australia in May 1989, via AARNet. Pegasus Networks was Australia's first public Internet provider in June 1989. The first commercial dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP) appeared in capital cities soon after, and by the mid-1990s, almost the entire country had a range of choices of dial-up ISPs. Today, Internet access is available through a range of technologies, i.e. hybrid fibre coaxial cable, digital subscriber line (DSL), Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and satellite Internet. In July 2009, the federal government, in partnership with the industrial sector, began rolling out a nationwide fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and improved fixed wireless and satellite access through the National Broadband Network. Subsequently, the roll out was downgraded to a Multi-Technology Mix on the promise of it being less expensive and with earlier completion. In October 2020, the federal government announced an upgrade by 2023 of NBN fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) services to FTTP for 2 million households, at a cost of A$3.5 billion.
Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
The Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) is an Australian research institute focusing on the development of broadband-enabled applications and technologies. The institute is based in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Melbourne in Victoria (Australia). Research in the centre is clustered around five research themes:
.au Domain Administration (auDA) is the policy authority and industry self-regulatory body for the .au domain, which is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia. It was formed in 1999 to manage the .au ccTLD with the endorsement of the Australian Government and the authority of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It is a not-for-profit membership organisation that promotes and protects the .au domain space.
Michael Frederick Hauben was an American Internet theorist and author. He pioneered the study of the social impact of the Internet. Based on his interactive online research, in 1993 he coined the term and developed the concept of Netizen to describe an Internet user who actively contributes towards the development of the Net and acts as a citizen of the Net and of the world. Along with Ronda Hauben, he co-authored the 1997 book Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Hauben's work is widely referenced in many scholarly articles and publications about the social impact of the Internet.
Geoff Huston is a scientist who orchestrated the construction of the first internet network between Australian universities known as AARNet.