I consider myself lucky to have been part of a generation of humanity that existed before the world wide web and to experience its early years and the transformative effects that it has had on generations since.
One of my earliest memories of “being online” was visiting a local government building and booking a 30min session on a desktop computer running windows 3.x and netscape navigator 1.0 and accessing newsgroups. There was also the ability to apply for an email address, which as far as I remember was username@<subdomain>.<domain>.gov.au. When my application for an email address was approved, I was given a 1.44MB 3.5” floppy disc with Eudora 1.x on it, pre-configured with my account.
I estimated this time to be around 1994-1995. Later, my guess is around 1997ish, this government provided Internet and email service was decommissioned and I was advised I could get another email address for free from the new-fangled “Hotmail”.
Yet, searching around on the Internet I can simply find nothing about this service. So I asked Mastodon.
It always impresses me that given the right sort of question the Mastodon community can band together to find information. Full props going to Europlus for discovering this obscure piece of text from a saved email from a sysop mail list that is now over 30 years old:
CIN.TXT
The Department of Social Security (DSS) is set to begin trials of a public computer network that, if successful, will give all Australians access to free e-mail and Internet services, it was revealed last week.
The Community Information Network (CIN) will be a major part of the department’s Community Research Project, and will be aimed at preventing the rise of information-poor ghettos.
A pilot for the network will commence this month and will continue until December 1996. It will encompass Tasmania, the ACT and parts of Brisbane and Adelaide, as well as the town of Gympie, north of Brisbane. According to Sandra Hogan, national marketing manager for the network, local access points (LAPs), consisting of 386 PCs equipped with 28.8Kbps modems and running the final beta of Windows 95, will be established in community centres, libraries, community/welfare group shopfronts, shopping centres and DSS offices. These LAPs will be free to any user, whether they receive payments from the DSS or not, Hogan said. Some CIN users, such as home carers for whom LAPs may not be easily accessible, will be directly furnished with the PCs free of charge, said Linda Cholson, project manager for the ACT arm of CIN.
While in the first instance the pilot program will only allow for the exchange of e-mail within the CIN domain, it is likely that this will soon be expanded to full Internet access, according to Tim Field, assistant secretary for the DSS’s strategic development division, and manager of the CIN project.
While the CIN will be accessible from home via a `13′ number, any broadening of its e-mail domain would be limited to users accessing the network from one of the 300 trial LAPs, he said.
“If the reason we have LAPs is to provide access to the information superhighway to people who don’t have their own PCs and modems because of the cost, it would be logical to provide full [Internet] functionality.”
According to Craig Gibson, technical manager for the network, there is a “reasonably large” likelihood that the DSS will expand the e-mail domain to allow e-mail to be sent to and from the Internet, but only with a restricted capacity.
People wanting to use the service will be able to apply for an e-mail address online at any LAP, and will be informed in writing by the DSS within a week, said Cholson. E-mail, which is normally downloaded to a local PC, will remain on the DSS host in Canberra. This will avoid private e-mail being downloaded to LAP PCs which are used by multiple users, said Gibson.
In Canberra, LAPs will initially be distributed amongst 12 organisations, including all public libraries.The CIN network will be managed out of DSS offices in Canberra.
This sounds very familiar to me, as I am pretty sure the email domain was @<something>.dss.gov.au
geraldew pointed me in the direction of Trove which suddenly became useful as I was now armed with a name for the network. Trove pointed me in the direction of an ANU Link maillist which is an “email discussion list for people interested in the development of the internet in Australia although its strays from time to time into wider issues of communication.“. I was able find out on May 24 1995 the CIN Webmaster wanted people to check out the new CIN Website. Unfortunately there are no Wayback machine captures from this time.
Other threads of note from May 1996:
- Many emails discussing internet censorship and protecting children. Nearly 30 years later and we’re still talking about it.
- Government proposals to regulate the Internet
- How Many Australian Internet Users?
- The Telstra Sale
I’m not quite sure if this is the end of the story. For some reasons I have strong memories of it being called the Community Public Access Network (CPAN) (not to be confused with Perl CPAN), and that it may have morphed into CIN.
If you have any memories of mid-1990s Internet in Australia and a government public internet network that you could get an email address with for a few short years, I would love to hear your stories so that I can add to this near-forgotten piece of Australian Internet history!
PS: It would be remiss of me to mention that I am already familiar with Roger Clarke’s Brief History of the Internet, and was one of the first places I went looking. Roger also features in the ANU Link mail list above.
Update 2025-05-23
David Coombe has contacted me with some excellent links from Trove that gives more solid information around the dates of the CIN which seems to have been conceived around June/July 1995 and then decomissioned in February 1997:
- Trove Articles on CIN
- Canberra Times Article on the CIN
- Gazetted Invitation to create CIN for interested parties
There are even some videos available on request (not available online)