Of course it is not new when I was in primary school teachers use to tell us that in remote places in Australia there is school over the radio. But I always wondered why over the radio when already at the time you could do it over the internet using email instructions. But I guess not all people had a computer and internet connection in Australia, and building internet infrastructure all over the place is challenging. To this day half of the world still doesn't have internet connection.
I guess not all people had a computer and internet connection in Australia
It's still the case in much of the world. On HN, we don't realize how lucky we are to have internet connections.
In the mid-sized American city where I lived recently, the most recent numbers show almost 200,000 people with NO internet access at all. Not at home. Not at work. Not even on their phones. That number expands to over 400,000 when the rest of the county is included.
If you raise the percentage of the city that represents up, it starts to get unbelievable. If you vary it down, your city wouldn’t qualify well as midsized. Do you have a source for your claim?
I live in Albany, NY. My neighbor is a teacher in a rural district about 35 miles to the southwest. 65% of students don’t have internet, and many don’t have phones at home as the landline network rots away and is expensive. ($60/mo unless you qualify for food stamps)
So they are parking school busses in areas with cell signal with hotspots for kids to do work and mailing or distributing paper for kids to work on.
In the city, I think ~30% lack internet, which is gross considering that 90% of the population is within a few hundred yards of extensive fiber optic infrastructure laid to support the state government and universities.
Also, it wasn't "broadcast radio" but more like ham radio, offering a level of interactivity most internet connections at the time couldn't offer.
When I heard of it, in the 1990s, most internet connections were still dial-up, not broadband, probably even more so in the Australian Outback.
Aside from that, it seems farms in the Outback were often already equipped with ham radios, while computers weren't as widespread, and still quite expensive.
The internet connection probably didn’t exist or it was too slow in the outback. I’m from a relatively densely-populated part of the country and we only recently got satellite, before that the only other option was dial-up or a USB device that plugged into your computer and allowed it to use 3G.
