This Tuesday marked 25 years to the day since Internet arrived in Australia, first transmitted directly from Hawaii to the University of Melbourne on 24 June, 1989.

That day marked the first time there was continuous, real-time access to resources from any connected computer down under, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Back then, the Internet didn't have YouTube, Facebook or Google (or iTWire, for that matter); at in 1989 the Internet was merely bulletin boards and discussion forums used by university academics.

Professor Justin Zobel from the University of Melbourne's department of computing and information systems was one of Australia's first Internet users, and he's told media this week he remembers the days where Australia, as a nation, would download around 4MB per day.

That figure is now exponentially higher, especially now that fibre broadband is becoming a reality (in some parts of the country).

"In the early 90s, I think there was a gradual sense of shock that this community of people who knew each other, was slowly being taken over by the public," Prof Zobel said.

"I don't think anyone foresaw the internet being used illegally, for pornography or stolen music or things of that kind."

Professor Zobel told media he loved the use of email, being able to correspond without having to talk on the phone.

"I may now get hundreds of emails on a typical day but I couldn't cope with hundreds of telephone calls," he said in an interview, adding that usage of the Internet quickly grew due to academic use.

“The net was the driver of academic activity in a small number of disciplines such as maths, electrical engineering and computer­ science, which was creating the technology,” he said.

“People could share work ­efficiently for the first time, but it was in an era when storage capacities and bandwidth were drastically smaller. The storage system for the whole of the University of Melbourne was 50MB.

“People didn’t have the space to store the kinds of things we do today. The technology was really just used for academics and tech development.”

Professor Zobel said in the interview the Mosaic web browser in 1993 was "the development that saw the internet take off, spreading from­ the halls of academia to government departments and corporations."

“Disks were suddenly a lot cheaper and a threshold was passed in storage capacity. It provided people with a reason to do things like visit a page where there might be pictures,” he said.

“Effective web search wasn’t turned on until two, 2½ years later.

“All that growth was occurring without the capacity to search. People were sharing links by word of mouth, writing them down, and typing in the addresses,” he said.

The anniversary comes at a time where Australia is dropping in worldwide Internet speed rankings, though according to Akamai in Q4 2013 average connection speeds rose 8% quarter-over-quarter to 5.8Mbs while average peak connection speeds grew 17% quarter-over-quarter to 35.2Mbs.

Akamai's State of the Internet report showed Australia dropped three places in global speed rankings to 44th, beaten by regional neighbours Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan.