Geoff Huston was born the year television arrived in Australia. But his parents wouldn’t let him watch. While he sometimes snuck away to friends’ houses with TV, Huston says his deprivation forced him to read. Through books, he developed a love of words, a love that oddly enough led him to become the father of the Internet in Australia.
The Internet Hall of Fame inducted Huston as an inaugural member for his crucial work to get Australia online in the late 1980s. While he’s honored to be included, Huston says the credit is overblown. He says he just happened to be the geek who could speak.
“When geeks came together, I guess I was just articulate about stating what we wanted,” Huston says. And what they wanted was simply to connect.
Back in the proto-Internet early ’80s, Huston says connecting wasn’t so simple. Network techs were locked in what he calls the “great protocol wars” over which was the best technology to allow computers to talk to each other. Then multi-protocol routers came along and made that debate pointless. Universities began building networks on their campuses. Huston and others believed the next logical step was to connect those campus networks together to make a...