Nikkei MIX

» see mix.or.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The software was written at the University of Guelph, in Ontario. It was called CoSy, and it sorted discussion into named conferences instead of one flat chronological pile. In the middle 1980s McGraw-Hill licensed it to run BYTE magazine's subscriber network in Massachusetts. When McGraw-Hill's Japanese joint venture wanted a conferencing service of its own, it did not go shopping. It took the same Canadian program and built a Japanese version, which it pointed at a host in Tokyo. Members logging in saw a banner reading MIX COSY 3.1.3J, and under it, in English, Nikkei Mix Information Exchange. BIX stood for Byte Information eXchange. Nobody was hiding where the idea came from.

Nikkei McGraw-Hill opened trials in September 1986 with about four thousand people, staff and outsiders, paying nothing. In March 1987 the host moved from a minicomputer to a mainframe, and the service went paid six months after that. By December 1992 it had roughly fifteen thousand members and more than two hundred conferences. Each conference had an appointed 議長, a chair, and the service glossed the word for newcomers as whatever your other network calls a sysop or a moderator. Chairs were expected to write digests of their own subconferences, in whatever format they liked.

Fifteen thousand was small and the operators knew it. Their own 1993 write-up notes that the big networks were boasting of half a million members. What 日経MIX had instead was stated plainly in the same paper: most of the members were hardware or software engineers, and the arguments were good.

Then, on 27 May 1997, Impress reported that it would close at 11am on 31 October. ASCII had announced the end of ASCII Net earlier the same month. Two of the oldest dial-up services in Japan were going down in the same year, and INTERNET Watch would rank the pair as the fourth biggest Japanese internet story of 1997.

~ the record ~

~ nine hundred and seventy yen ~

The price card from March 1993 reads like a utility bill. Five thousand yen to join, or three thousand if you subscribed to one of Nikkei's computer magazines. Nine hundred and seventy yen a month, which included your first thirty minutes. Twenty yen a minute from there to a monthly total of 240 minutes, then ten yen a minute beyond that. The meter stopped at ten thousand yen however long you stayed, a ceiling that worked out to about twelve hours a month. Payment was by bank transfer, because the service did not take credit cards. You joined by posting in a paper form.

Metered time is what carries forward worst from any of this. Four hours of reading in a month was where Nikkei halved your rate, and past about twelve hours the clock simply stopped mattering. The service ran from 05:00 to 04:00 the following morning, and went down every Thursday between 11 and 16. People planned around that.

~ the open letters ~

The 1993 paper has a section on what the membership had been up to lately, and that section is why this service earns a page of its own. Members who were unhappy with the feature set of an operating system Microsoft had in development talked it over in conference, worked out between themselves which functions ought to be in it, collected signatures, and sent the company an open letter. In the Yokogawa-Hewlett-Packard conference, printer owners agreed that support in Japan ought to match what the same products got in the United States, and sent a signed letter to the company president.

Both of those happened inside conferences the vendors themselves were chairing. Dozens of companies ran one: JustSystems, Omron, Konami, Apple Japan, Sun Microsystems, IBM Japan's OS/2 task team, HAL Laboratory, Borland, Seiko Epson, Toshiba, Vector. A vendor conference was a support channel until the day the customers organized inside it.

The service shows up in other people's histories too. The name DOS/V, the thing Japanese users called the PC/AT clones that could finally display Japanese without special hardware, spread through 日経MIX and NIFTY-Serve networkers rather than out of IBM's marketing. VZ Editor, one of the defining Japanese text editors of the period, was improved with advice from MIX's assembler conference and feedback from its v.c. conference.

~ the science fiction chair ~

The sf conference was chaired by 今岡清, who had spent twelve years as editor in chief of S-F Magazine and restarted the Hayakawa SF Contest. In November 1993 he brought out the Japanese translation of Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, a book about American law enforcement raiding bulletin boards, while running a conference on one. From July 1994 his members held short-short story contests with the length limit set in full-width characters, roughly four hundred of them and later eight hundred. Entries went in anonymously through an organizer and were voted on with stars. There had been twenty-seven rounds by 1997, and a member put the whole archive into HTML.

Members called themselves MIXEN. The site kept a page of their personal homepages alongside a page about their offline meetups. In 1997 they took a booth at Macworld Expo Tokyo.

~ what the notice did not say ~

On 30 June 1997 at 16:00 Nikkei stopped charging. The service ran free for its last four months. The May announcement had said conferences would go read only on 29 August, and in the end writing continued until 24 October, which is nearly two extra months of talking that nobody had promised.

The replacement was a web conference system called BizTech Forum. It ran experimentally from early October for existing members and opened properly in November, free at first, with a plan written into the notice to start charging around the end of 1998. The mix.or.jp mail domain was carried across. The ten years of conferences were not: BizTech Forum was to get a download function so that former members could fetch the old logs for a limited period, once it was ready.

ASCII, closing ASCII Net in the same season, wrote its reason into its own notice, saying that dial-up had stopped suiting the times. Nikkei's two documents do not. The May report carries no cause, and the farewell page thanks members for their long support and goes straight on to the successor. The explanation that survives is secondhand: INTERNET Watch's December round-up, putting the two closures together at number four in its stories of the year, says both companies gave the shift from dial-up to the internet as their reason. For whatever Nikkei said out loud that year, the pages it left on the web say nothing at all.

One more thing, visible only from here: McGraw-Hill sold out of the joint venture in May 1988 and the company became Nikkei Business Publications that July. 日経MIX ran for another nine years on software it had picked because of a partner that no longer owned any of it.

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