Mandic BBS

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

~ the goodbye ~

mandic was a brazilian bbs, on portuguese-language menus, billed in cruzados and later in reais, accessible only from a sao paulo metro phone number until later expansion. in those days. in 1990 i was six and on no internet at all. by the time i got a 14.4k modem on a turknet ttnet account in 1998, mandic was already past its bbs era and most of the way through becoming a sale target for an argentine carrier. i never logged in.

aleksandar mandić had spent eighteen years at siemens do brasil when he quit in early 1990 to open a bulletin board out of his house. the date that gets cited in the brazilian press is 22 april 1990. the operation started on a single phone line his wife was not using. it was the first commercial bbs in brazil. for a stretch in the early nineties it was effectively the only place in the country where you could pay to log in to a multi-user service that connected you to other people.

by 1995 the books showed 10,000 paying users, around $2 million in revenue and 90 dial-up lines installed in the sao paulo office. when the brazilian commercial internet opened up in 1996, mandic took a partner: GP investimentos paid roughly $2 million for half the company in january of that year. mandic internet became one of the early national isps. by 1997 and 1998 it was winning best-provider awards in trade press.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

this happened in a part of the world i was not yet connected to. close enough. the early nineties bbs scene in brazil was thin: a handful of operators, mostly hobbyist, mostly in the south or in sao paulo. mandić's edge was that he ran it like a business from day one. the line count grew steadily and the operation kept up with the rate-of-change as 2400-baud modems gave way to 14.4k and then 28.8k.

when the commercial web reached brazil in late 1995, mandic was one of the operations best positioned to convert. it already had paying subscribers and a brand inside the small brazilian tech press. that was the part GP investimentos was buying when it took its half-stake in january 1996.

~ how it ended ~

this part you had to be in the region for, and i was not. by 1999 mandic internet had around 110,000 users. impsat, the argentine telecommunications group that was rolling up regional carriers across south america, bought the operation outright. close enough. impsat then folded the consumer side into a portal called o site, which was meant to be its general-purpose brazilian web destination.

o site never took off. the dot-com correction arrived in 2000 and 2001, and the impsat experiment with portal-style consumer destinations got reabsorbed into the carrier business. that is the moment the mandic bbs and the mandic isp brand effectively went dark as a consumer product. either way, mandić himself had already moved on, helping launch iG with nizan guanaes and matinas suzuki in 1999.

~ what got buried with it ~

what disappeared was the only pre-web commercial online service most brazilians of the era could have used. the bbs scene in brazil never had a real second wave, the country's connected population went straight from mandic and a handful of regional bbses to the commercial web, then over to iG and uol. anyway, the bbs-as-portal moment never materialized the way the american scene had it.

mandić himself relaunched the brand in 2002 as mandic mail, a corporate email service that survived the second dot-com and eventually sold to riverwood capital in 2012 for around R$ 100 million. he passed away on 6 may 2021. the bbs is a museum item now, the kind of operation that gets reconstructed from old screenshots and harvard business school case studies.

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