TWICS

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

~ the last words ~

Two Way Information Communication System is what the letters stood for, and in 1982 that described a conferencing system on a VAX with nothing to do with the internet, which did not yet exist in a form anyone in Tokyo could buy.

It ran out of the International Education Center, a Tokyo nonprofit, and the person who built the community around it was Jeff Shapard, an American English teacher who had arrived from Montana in 1981 and found himself doing electronic networking by 1984. A teenage Joi Ito was in it early and came back years later as president of PSINet Japan. Howard Rheingold gave TWICS a chapter in The Virtual Community, which is the only reason most English-speaking readers have ever heard the name.

1993 is the year that matters here, and it sits five years before I first got a modem to hold a line. By the time I was dialing at 14.4k in Turkey, TWICS had been selling internet access in Tokyo for half a decade, on top of eleven years as an online community before that.

~ the record ~

~ the community years ~

From 1982 to 1993 TWICS was not an access provider at all. It was Participate running on a VAX, where members read into and wrote into threaded conferences. The membership was unusual for Japan at the time: Japanese and foreign residents in the same rooms, in both languages, which was the whole point of putting the thing inside a language school.

That mix is what Rheingold picked up on. Most of the early online communities he wrote about were national and monolingual. TWICS was neither.

~ what changed in 1993 ~

In 1993 TWICS leased a line from InterCon International KK, an American-owned outfit operating in Japan, and started offering public access internet service. That made it the first organization in the country to sell internet access to whoever asked for it. Internet Initiative Japan, founded the year before, is usually named as Japan's first commercial ISP, and that is a different claim about a different thing. IIJ was building infrastructure. TWICS was selling accounts to people.

Migration off the VAX onto HP-UX and Linux began in 1995. For a few years the conferencing community and the dial-up business ran side by side under one roof, which is the detail that dates it hardest, because that combination had stopped making sense almost everywhere by the end of the decade.

~ the next chapter ~

PSINet bought TWICS in 1998 as part of its push into Japan. PSINet went bankrupt in 2001 and Cable & Wireless IDC picked up the Japanese operation that December. In 2003 it changed hands again, to Inter.net Global.

The Wayback Machine has twics.com serving its own homepage on 8 April 2003 and answering with a redirect by the 24th, and it never serves its own pages again. Nothing was announced. The brand had been somebody else's line item for five years by then, and it went out the way a line item goes out, with a redirect.

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