ASCII Net

~ the eulogy ~

ASCII Net closed about a year before I first got a modem working, which puts it in the part of internet history I can read about carefully but cannot remember. It also happened in Japanese, on a host in Tokyo, for a few thousand people who mostly knew each other. There is no version of my life where I was on it. What is worth writing down is how early it was and how much of what came later was already sitting inside it.

ASCII was a publisher. It printed the computer magazines that Japanese owners of Japanese machines read, and in May 1985 it opened a dial-up host as an experiment, which made it the first commercial PC communication service in the country. PC-VAN followed in 1986 and NIFTY-Serve in 1987, and both of those got much larger. ASCII Net stayed small on purpose and stayed strange because of it.

The experimental phase ran until 29 May 1987. After that it went paid and split into separate services keyed to different machines, with an MSX host from December 1986 and others following, which were eventually merged back into one system in March 1992. Every user carried a fixed ID. Active members numbered in the hundreds to low thousands, which is small enough that the whole thing worked like a neighborhood.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

The boards used a format called HyperNotes. Each board let any member open a note on a topic and let other members hang replies off that note, which is a thread in everything but name. The other Japanese services of the period only allowed operator-created boards, and every reply went into one running pile regardless of what it was about. Being able to sort your own conversations was a real advantage in 1988 and people said so.

Every account also had a profile, a written thing about your interests that anyone could pull up with a short command. Later writing about ASCII Net tends to compare it to 2ch, because of the anything-goes reputation, but the fixed IDs and the small headcount make the comparison to mixi more honest. It was a social network with a command line, running eighteen years before anybody used that phrase.

~ what came out of it ~

Software and running jokes born on ASCII Net leaked outward onto every other Japanese host. The board called junk.test became the one people named when they wanted to describe what the service felt like. The note format got copied into grassroots host software that hobbyists ran on their own machines, which is how a design decision made by a publisher in 1987 ended up being the shape of Japanese amateur bulletin boards for a decade.

It also produced the first Japanese online scandal I can find a record of. When the Sharp X68000 was announced in 1987, a member offered to buy machines on behalf of anyone who would send him three hundred thousand yen, collected several million, and disappeared. It never went to the police. The people he took it from found him and beat him instead. Every problem the modern internet has was already fully present at a few thousand accounts, with a phone bill attached.

~ the day it died ~

Windows 95 shipped and the entire premise stopped making sense. ASCII bolted internet access onto the service the way its competitors did, adding telnet and FTP through 1994, internet mail that October, a web gateway in January 1996 and dial-up IP that May. None of it moved the numbers. If you have a real internet connection you do not need a host.

The end was announced on 2 May 1997, with ASCII saying plainly that PC communication no longer suited the times and that it was shifting to the internet. The service stopped on 24 August 1997 with 19,026 IDs registered, followed by a read-only period so people could get their things out. Then somebody burned the boards to CD-ROM and mailed copies to the first two thousand members who asked. That is a better ending than most services of that generation managed.

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