20 years young

From Geoff Huston on the Australian Network Operators Mailing List

On the night of the 23rd June 1989 Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne and Torben Neilsen of the University of Hawaii completed the connection work that bought the Internet to Australia. It was a 56kbps satellite circuit, and the Australian end used a Proteon P4100 router.

Since that day we've evidently connected some 56.8% of the population, or 12,073,852 Australians, to the Internet (according to user statistics published by the ITU-T)

I think thats a pretty impressive record, and worth noting!