MONET – Monash university's campus LAN in the 1980s – a bridge to better networking

Abstract

Monash University, Australia developed an in-house local area network called MONET during the 1980s to meet the needs of the university's computer users. The Monash University Computer Centre team created and installed an economical computer access network across an extensive campus with distributed computer installations and a large numbers of users. MONET was an early implementation of a Local Area Network (LAN) at a time when LAN concepts were evolving and specific hardware and software for the purpose did not yet exist. MONET became a successful large scale system that was in development and then operation to support all the University's computer services for over a decade. It was also commercialized and used by various other organizations.