MHSnet is a

store-and-forward Store and forward is a telecommunications technique in which information is sent to an intermediate station where it is kept and sent at a later time to the final destination or to another intermediate station. The intermediate station, or node ...

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 The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

. MHSnet was originally developed at the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...

Piers Lauder There has been one baronetcy granted to the Lauder family. The baronetcy of Lauder of Fountainhall, Haddingtonshire, was created for John Lauder, last surviving male representative of the Lauders of that Ilk, a rich merchant-burgess and someti ...

and

Bob Kummerfeld Bob, BOB, or B.O.B. may refer to: People, fictional characters, and named animals *Bob (given name), a list of people and fictional characters * Bob (surname) * Bob (dog), a dog that received the Dickin Medal for bravery in World War II *Bob th ...

and was originally known as SUNIII (Sydney University Network version 3). Technically, it is similar in concept to

UUCP UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...

in that it enabled the transfer of email,

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

, and files in an efficient manner over non-dedicated links. In addition, it supported dynamic routing and a hierarchical name space avoiding the limitations of hardwired network addresses. MHSnet was a key technology in the introduction of

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

access in

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

. Due to the prohibitive costs of telecommunications structure, and the small amount of bandwidth available both internally and to other countries, MHSnet provided a system that could more efficiently use network resources. Gateways between ACSnet and the Internet were provided by many universities, and access to non-academic users was granted in the early 1990s. In 1989, with the introduction of

AARNet AARNet (Australian Academic and Research Network) provides Internet services to the Australian education and research communities and their research partners. AARNet built the Internet in Australia. In 1995, the Australian Vice-Chancellors' C ...

which directly connected Australia's Universities to the Internet, the ACSnet and MHSnet became obsolete. ACSnet connected hosts in Australia resided in a .oz domain, which was moved into the Internet's

.au .au is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia. It was created on 5March 1986. Domain name policy is managed by .au Domain Administration (auDA). As of July 2018, the registry is operated by Afilias. History The dom ...

namespace as .oz.au.

References

External links

History of the Internet in Australia
Network file transfer protocols History of the Internet Internet in Australia {{Compu-network-stub