AARNet has commissioned and launched a book to celebrate 20 years of the Internet in Australia. It’s hard to put a hard and fast figure on the age of the Internet in Australia. Rather than a single moment, the Internet began as a series of events, headed up by some of the country’s most pioneering computing scientists. In June 1989, however, the first international Internet connection was placed through a 56 kilobit per second satellite link that connected the University of Melbourne and the University of Hawaii. It the first known direct live overseas link with Australia. The same connection to the United States today is 200,000 times faster, operating at 10 gigabits (Gbps) per second.