Nownuri

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

~ the obituary ~

Nownuri's peak years line up almost exactly with my first modem, and that is the whole of what we have in common. While i was dialing a turkish number at 33.6k in 1998, a million and a half koreans were logging into a blue text screen that had nothing to do with the web at all. Korea spent the nineties on a parallel internet of its own, four national dial-up services carrying most of the country's online population, and Nownuri was the third biggest of them.

Nowcom opened it in october 1994. It had started that march as Book-Net, an information service about books, widened into a general pc communication service in may, and took the Nownuri name for its commercial launch. The name stacks the korean words for me and for the wider world, which is the kind of name a 1994 product could carry without embarrassment.

It was the first commercial korean service to sell a 14,400 bps connection, which in 1994 was a reason people picked one provider over another. By 2000 it carried 1.51 million members against Chollian's 2.62 million, at around ten thousand won a month before the phone company took its own cut for the call. What that bought was a system of boards and clubs where nobody used a real name.

The decline reads the way it reads everywhere. Broadband arrived in korea harder and faster than anywhere else on earth from 1999, and the free portals took the paying users off the dial-up services by the simple method of not charging. Nownuri tried to become a web portal with games attached and never found an audience for it. I have read all of this rather than lived it, and the honest distance is that the whole korean pc communication era happened in a language i cannot read, on phone numbers i could never have dialed.

~ the case file ~

~ the dark year ~

In august 1996 the police arrived at Nowcom's office in Bangbae-dong with a warrant. They were after Hanchongryeon, the student federation whose demonstrations at Yonsei University that summer had turned into the largest confrontation of the decade, and Hanchongryeon had a closed user group running on Nownuri. The group was shut down by force.

The part that got remembered is a question one of the officers asked while standing in the building: which room is the Hanchongryeon room. He was looking for a door. Korean users still call 1996 the dark year of pc communications, and this is the story they tell to explain what it felt like. The state had worked out that these places mattered without yet working out what they were.

~ the actual end ~

Nowcom moved the service out to a spin-off called Nao S&T in 2006, which is usually what happens shortly before something is allowed to die. Modem access had already been switched off in 2004, so the service ran over telnet after that, reachable only by people who still had a terminal program and a reason to open it. The telnet side went in 2012.

The closure was announced on 8 december 2012 for 31 january 2013, with two months of free access in between so that people could get their files off. There was a save-nownuri campaign online, of the sort that always appears and never works, and the company's statement was the usual mixture of thanks and regret. Nineteen years of somebody's twenties were sitting in those boards.

~ what the company became ~

Nowcom did not die with it. The same company started an internet broadcasting business in 2006, and that business is AfreecaTV, which spent the next two decades as the dominant live streaming platform in korea before renaming itself SOOP in 2024. The dial-up service was spun out to a subsidiary and closed. The streaming service kept the parent.

There is a straight line there. What Nownuri was actually for, which was people talking to each other in public under invented names, did not stop and has not stopped. It moved to a place with video and a payment button, run by the same company, and the boards were the part that could not make the rent.

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