Hitel

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

~ the obituary ~

Hitel's best years line up almost exactly with my first ones online, and the two never touch. In 1998 i dialed a Turkish ISP and what came back was the open web, a browser and whatever happened to be out there. In Korea the same phone line had been going somewhere else for a decade, into a service with its own clubs and a couple of million people inside it, and Turkey never had anything of that shape at any scale.

The lineage is longer than the name. The Korea Economic Daily started a Prestel service on 1 November 1986 and renamed it KETEL in April 1987. It went through one more name in early 1992 before landing on HiTEL that July. The operating company, Korea PC Telecom, had been set up in December 1991 as a joint venture between the newspaper and Korea Telecom, which is how a media company's side project turned into something close to national infrastructure.

You reached it with a terminal program and the number 01410. What arrived was text on a blue screen, navigated by typing short commands, and inside were message boards, mail, chat rooms, file libraries and a baduk server. The organizing unit was the donghohoe, the club, which is nearer to a subreddit with a membership roll than to a forum. Something approaching a million Koreans were doing this before most of them had ever opened a browser.

~ the case file ~

~ what got buried with it ~

On 3 October 1997 a twenty-something posted the opening chapters of a fantasy novel on Hitel's science fiction and fantasy board. He kept going until April 1998, called himself a typer rather than a writer because he composed straight onto the keyboard, and put out somewhere around twelve thousand manuscript pages. The novel was Dragon Raja, by Lee Young-do, and it has since sold over two million copies across Korea and Japan.

That is what the club boards were for. They were not a place people went to read finished work, they were where the work got made in public, chapter by chapter, in front of an audience that answered back the same night. Korean web fiction as an industry begins there. So does a good part of the games industry, since the first commercial Korean MUDs ran on these services from 1994, Jurassic Park on Chollian and Land of Dangun on Nownuri and then Hitel, and the studios that wrote them became companies.

~ the long tail ~

The end was slow and administrative rather than dramatic. Broadband arrived in Korea from 1999 with a government push behind it, and a walled dial-up service had nothing to sell against a permanent connection. Hitel spent the early 2000s trying to become a web portal instead, merged with KT's other portal Hanmir into a new brand called Paran in 2004, and kept a diminished terminal service running for years after most of the users had gone.

KTH switched that terminal service off on 28 February 2007 and said the club and board databases would move to Paran's club server from March. It is worth sitting with what that sentence describes: twenty years of a country's writing and argument, handled as a database import into a portal almost nobody was using. Paran was folded into Daum in 2012. Nownuri held out until January 2013, and with it the last of the pre-web Korean internet closed for good.

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