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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

> Stressful at the time, better memories now

Yeah - I look back at the crew I worked with and it was stressful, but ultimately we all cared deeply about what we were doing. I wish I could find something like that today.

Access-1 brings back memories. They really had a huge opportunity but from our perspective they blew it.

My memory is weak but IIRC we were desperate for bandwidth and A1 had a copper pair to the local library capable of delivering 2Mbps - which we were told was not actually terminated. We tried to get A1 to talk to us, they said talk to the library, the library refused to meet with us. It all fell apart not long after.

The timeline is hazy now but I think this was a driver for our satellite business, and we ended up outlasting almost everyone - at least until the First Great Consolidation after Comindico hit town.

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A1 built tails mostly at 64 and 2mbit to the first generation integrated modems. The backbone was otherwise built using Telecom Australia/Telstra's Metro Network product, which ran out of W.A. and was very unforgiving. Rackable modem product was complicated to run. The Cisco integrated device was nice, but it's s/w stack was immature (I also worked on this at connect IIRC)

There were often boundary issues around who talked to whom, who was an ISP, who wanted to be, who was an intermediary. Having a pair into an MDF was the least of the problems sometimes, I went to some meetings (I'd rather forget) about peering (financial settlement) issues. Ideally yes, you'd just plug stuff in and go. In reality, that wasn't how business worked.

Labtam had a /16 direct from IANA, (not through AUNIC) from their manufacturing days. Now, that would be worth $3.5m -At the time, it was a godsend but not enough. The company had been bought at a low point in Australian PCB manufacturing at a stock-sale floor price, by two "entrepreneurs" who may well have been good businessmen but didn't understand the Internet one bit. Maybe they understood it too well, I remember a screaming match at a pre-sales tech meetup where one of them floated heads-up 3D VRML shopping malls and when I said "not technically feasible yet" I was roundly pasted for being defeatist. I didn't last in that company long.

Yeah, we were hopeful that we could benefit from the A1 backbone - it was funded by the government right? like a precursor to NBN - but we ended up going it alone.

I won't talk about NBN, what a shitshow. The economics of the internet in Australia have already been terrible, and the government never seems to invest in the places where it could have the most impact.

For some reason I can see the Labtam logo in my mind's eye, but I can't remember why I know it. We used a lot of JTEC gear in the olden days. Did they end up buying Labtam maybe? I have no idea any more!

it was funded by the government right? like a precursor to NBN

It was always privately owned: built by Labtam (I guess they saw it as a complementary service to their X terminal product), then acquired by Solution6, then OzEmail, then UUnet. I think they had some government clients though. Certainly Australia Post was one.

They had a big business in the 90s selling X terminals (see my root-level comment). I'd guess that's most likely where you saw the brand. After that subsided it looks (from the Wayback machine) like they just did general electronic devices design/manufacture, before eventually going out of business in about 2016.

Ahh maybe it was the X terminals I remember. Probably from a magazine though. The only X terminals I got to use personally were from NCD, DG, HP and Apollo - and that was all before the ISP, since Linux was obviously pretty big by then.

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