바로타 (BAROTA)

» see barota.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Most dead websites were killed by a competitor or by a budget. BAROTA was killed by a capacity upgrade at the office next door, which is a rarer cause of death and a more honest one.

Korea's railway agency put its first booking system online during the dot-com years and immediately ran into the boring physical limit of the era: not enough machines. The main site could not serve everyone who wanted a seat. So in 2000 the agency built a second, separate website at barota.com and gave it to 철도회원, the paid railway membership scheme that later became Korail Membership. Members went there. Everybody else queued on the main site or at a station window. 바로타 reads in Korean as something like "ride it right away", which was the pitch.

It grew into a real product rather than a pressure valve. At first you could only hold a seat online and had to pay for it in person, which is how almost every early ticketing system in the world started. From 2001 BAROTA took electronic payment, so the reservation and the ticket became one transaction. Self-service machines appeared in stations that would print what a member had already booked, and a home-printing option followed. For a few years the fastest way to get a Korean train ticket was to be a member and to use the website that was not the official one.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Look at the shape of the workaround. A state agency hit a hardware ceiling and solved it by segmenting its users, then handed the segment with a paid relationship the better tool. That is a decision you make when servers are scarce and it becomes indefensible the moment they are not. Everybody who joined 철도회원 in those years got a faster internet than everybody who did not, and the reason was a purchase order, not a policy.

Korea moved quickly through that scarcity. Broadband arrived early and hard, the railway agency turned into Korea Railroad Corporation in January 2005, and korail.com stabilized into something that could handle a national holiday rush without help. At that point a members-only booking site was a second codebase to maintain for no benefit.

~ what it became ~

In 2006 BAROTA was reorganized into qubi.com and repositioned as a comprehensive travel platform, which was the going answer for any transport website that had run out of reasons to exist on its own. The old domain kept working for a while as a courtesy. A crawl of barota.com in January 2008 finds no site at all, only a meta refresh pushing the browser to qubi.com. Two years earlier the same address had still been titled, in plain Korean, "railway member homepage".

Qubi did not last the decade after that. Korean rail booking ended up where every rail booking ended up, inside the operator's own app, and the intermediate step of a members-only website is now a line in an encyclopedia and a handful of archived front pages. In Turkey in 2000 you still bought a train ticket by standing at a counter and being handed a piece of card, so the whole argument about which of the railway's two websites was faster is one I get to read about rather than remember.

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