Chollian

» see chollian.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Chollian died on 31 october 2024, which puts it in an odd category. I was online for every single year of its life and never once touched it. Thirty-nine years is longer than the entire consumer internet history of most countries, and for the last stretch of it the thing was still accepting logins in a language and a country i had no reason to be in. Almost everything else on this site died young. This one died old.

It began in october 1985, when Dacom put up a videotex trial with a database of practical household information on it, and opened commercially in september 1986. Videotex was the thing everyone tried in the mid eighties and almost nobody made work outside france. Korea made it work by turning it into something else. The BBS service PC-SERVE was folded in, and by 1992 Chollian was a full dial-up communication service with boards and mail and chat rooms on a screen of text you reached with a terminal program.

What followed was the decade korea spent online before the web arrived. Chollian added a monthly print magazine in january 1994, an internet gateway that october and web access in april 1995, which meant it was carrying its own subscribers out onto the open internet while still being the place they logged into first. PPP support landed in november 1996. The peak came in august 2000 at 3.5 million paying subscribers.

~ the record ~

~ the four ~

There were four of these services and between them they were the korean internet. Chollian at Dacom, Hitel out of a newspaper and Korea Telecom, Nownuri at Naucom, Unitel at Samsung. They held most of the country's online population through the nineties and then died one after another across fifteen years as broadband took everything: Hitel in february 2007, Nownuri in january 2013, Unitel in 2022, and Chollian last of all.

Chollian's first death was the terminal service, switched off on 27 december 2007. The company had been moving to the web for years by then, launching the CHOL portal in july 2003 and changing the mail domain from chollian.net to chol.com in 2004. The dial-up world was already empty by the time the plug came out. What survived it was the mail.

~ the day it died ~

The last owner was Media Log, a subsidiary of LG U+, which is Dacom by way of LG Dacom if you follow the corporate paperwork far enough back. The wind-down through 2024 was careful in a way that reads as some respect for how long people had been using it. Backup and forwarding tools went live on 11 july. The basic subscription fee was dropped on 1 august. The extra services stopped on 1 september, outgoing mail was disabled on 1 october, and the service ended on 31 october with the site held open until the end of november so people could pull their archives out.

Media Log's notice said that with the other portal services closing one after another it had become impossible to keep a mail service at the quality it wanted, and that the decision had been a hard one to make. That is boilerplate, and it is also probably accurate. Running email for a shrinking number of people who have had the same address since the nineties is a cost with no revenue anywhere near it.

So the oldest continuously running consumer online service in korea finished as a mailbox nobody was paying for. Thirty-nine years, from a videotex trial to an inbox with a forwarding rule on it.

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