JUNET

~ the obit ~

JUNET opened in October 1984 and closed in October 1994, a clean ten years that finished four years before I first heard a modem connect. None of it reached me and none of it was meant to. It was Japanese academics building a Japanese network in Japanese, in a decade when a country either did that for itself or did without.

Three universities around Tokyo started it for test and research purposes, which is the modest phrasing the record uses for what turned into a national internet. Jun Murai led the group, then at Tokyo Institute of Technology and later called the father of the internet in Japan. There was no backbone and no money for one. Machines dialed each other over ordinary telephone lines at 9600 bits per second and moved mail and news with UUCP, the same store-and-forward trick Usenet ran on.

It grew the way that sort of network grows, which is by someone agreeing to answer the phone. A handful of organizations in 1984 became more than 250 nodes across 87 organizations by July 1987, and around 700 machines at its widest. In 1986 it got out of the country, dialing into CSNET in the United States over a packet-switched circuit.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the name and the language ~

Two things came out of JUNET that outlived it by decades. Murai proposed.jp to the Information Sciences Institute in California on 5 August 1986 and it was established that year, so the country code at the end of every Japanese address was registered on behalf of a network with no permanent links anywhere in it.

The other was fj, short for From Japan, a Usenet hierarchy written mostly in Japanese. It carried the technical traffic you would expect and also anime and manga and whatever else people wanted to argue about, from 1984, over modems. The Turkish-language internet I turned up in was fourteen years younger than that and arrived in a different shape entirely, as web forums rather than a newsgroup tree.

~ the handoff ~

The WIDE Project started in 1988 and built the thing JUNET had been standing in for, a real IP network with links that stayed up, run largely by the same people. JUNET was not killed so much as made unnecessary, and it was discontinued in October 1994 with the traffic long gone.

fj outlived the network that produced it by decades and its group lists were still being maintained into the 2020s. That is the usual shape of these things. The wires get replaced and the conversation moves house without noticing that it did.

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