At 3/28/01 12:29 PM, fwetyson wrote:

Thanks for the assistance some of you have given I see a note next to the thread that this subject is Off Topic Does that mean I cant raise the question here?

Just a quick note from the other side of the Tasman - the earliest efforts appeared to be at the Victoria University, Wellington, where the Computer Science Department operated a modem-based trans-Tasman messaging service through the eighties - I'm not sure whether the link used the uunet protocols or the acsnet protocols, but I'm not sure thats all that relevant. It linked up to a comparable Computer Science messaging network in Australia. In the late eighties the Computer Centre Directors in both Australia and New Zealand spent much time talking about various forms of X.25-based network initiatives, but not much came of it. In 1988 a researcher at the University of Hawaii, Dr Torben Neilsen, obtained a NASA grant to provide Internet services to NASA-funded research scientists in the Asia Pacific region. Dr Neilsen had taken the view that project-based links were inefficient, and the better approach was to assist in funding academic and research infrastructure which in turn would assist the NASA-specific projects. The resultant program, PACCOM, started in late 1988, with John Houlker from the University of Waikato playing a major role for New Zealand. The first link was, as I recall, a 14.4Kbps analog modem connection, installed in late 88 (or thereabouts) with NASA and NZ funding. This spurred on efforts to set up an internal academic and research network in New Zealand, with the Universities, the Crown Research Institutes and a number of government ministries. Somewhere I still have the notes from John's PACCOM presentations describing the progress in New Zealand over the next 4 years - it was pretty stunning how much was achieved in such a short period of time. The most unusual aspect of the entire effort from myperspective was the very detailed charging scheme, which today is the NetTraMet meter work of Nevil Brownlee, which was used to charge network users different rates depending on the time of day, type of traffic, etc etc. I'm not sure if this happened anywhere else - it was quite a striking feature of the New Zealand network as I recall. Geoff Huston --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog