I was an undergraduate student at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in late 1992 and had, a few months earlier, switched my major from physics to linguistics (which will turn out to be important to this story).
Phil Dufty, the manager of University Computing Services at UWA believed all students should have access to the Internet, a forward-thinking idea at a time when it was, for the most part, confined to grad students and faculty, at least at Australian universities.
So one day in November 1992, I walked into a little office manned by Adam Soudure (who worked part-time as the first student sys admin) who created an account for me on tartarus, the Ultrix machine set aside for undergraduates.