PC-VAN

~ the eulogy ~

PC-VAN opened for business in april 1986, when i was two years old and there was no such thing as a home modem where i lived. By the time i first dialed anything, in 1998, it had been running for twelve years and was already most of the way through its life. This is a grave for something that was finished before my part of the internet started.

NEC switched it on 26 april 1986, out of a division that began at around twenty people. What you connected to was a text service at the end of a phone line: mail that could carry binary attachments, general and regional bulletin boards, an online software library people used to move shareware around, and a chat system called OLT that ran fifty channels at once. Closed user groups let members run private boards inside it, which is where most of the interesting things happened.

It grew the way these things grew once the machines got cheap. Half a million subscribers by 1992, a million by 1994, and the peak sitting right against the Windows 95 launch, which is the year japan bought computers in bulk. One of the NEC engineers who worked on it from 1989 onward has said the calls they remember were from working musicians and from deaf users, who had found in a text network something the telephone had never given them.

NEC launched BIGLOBE in july 1996 as its internet service, and from that point PC-VAN was a legacy system inside its own company. The announcement came on 11 december 2000.

~ the dossier ~

~ the two networks ~

Japan had two of these and the difference between them is the reason people still argue about it. NIFTY-Serve, run out of a Fujitsu joint venture, moderated hard. Sysops intervened, threads were managed, and the tone stayed inside something. PC-VAN did not do that. It ran close to hands-off, on the stated principle that people were responsible for what they wrote, and its boards were correspondingly more combative.

Which of the two you were on said something about you, in the way that being on a particular forum always does. The two cultures are the ancestors of every moderation argument the japanese internet has had since, and neither approach won, because the web turned up and made the question somebody else's problem.

~ the long handover ~

The end was staged rather than announced. NEC said on 11 december 2000 that PC-VAN would close, and gave individual users until the end of january 2001 and business accounts until april. The dedicated tools went with it: the PC-VAN Navigator client, PicoMate, WorldTalk, the database commands people had been typing for a decade and a half.

Mail addresses and user IDs carried over to BIGLOBE, which was the whole point of the exercise, and the special interest groups were moved to a BIGLOBE address so the communities could keep going on the web. They kept going for two more years. Everything that had come across from PC-VAN was shut down on 31 march 2003, seventeen years after the service opened, which is the date to use if you think a network is its people rather than its dial tone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »