Unitel

» see unitel.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Korea built a national online country before the web arrived and then kept living in it for years afterward. Turkey did not do this. We had bulletin boards, but nothing that became a national habit, and when I got a modem in 1998 the thing on the other end of it was already the open internet. So the whole PC통신 era reads to me as a parallel history: same decade, same modem noise, completely different shape of place to arrive in.

Unitel started in 1996 as Samsung SDS's service, arriving late into a market Chollian and Hitel had already carved up. It made one decision at the outset that separated it from all of them: from day one you used a graphical client called Uniwin, built for Windows 3.1, rather than the text terminal everyone else was serving. That was either forward-looking or annoying depending on which year you asked, and it meant Unitel never had to make the painful transition its rivals did.

The other thing that separated it was a film. 접속, released in 1997 and known in English as The Contact, is a love story in which two people who have never met talk to each other through a PC통신 chat room, and the service on screen was Unitel. A country watched its own new communication medium turn into a romance in a cinema, and then went home and signed up.

~ the dossier ~

~ the walled country ~

PC통신 was not the internet and was not trying to be. You dialed a number, you were inside one company's world, and everything you wanted had to exist in there: boards, clubs, mail, chat, news, shopping. The four services were Chollian, Hitel, Nownuri and Unitel, and which one you were on functioned like a hometown. Unitel priced itself as the accessible one, around ten thousand won a month with web browsing folded in rather than billed separately, at a point when the competitors were charging for internet access on top.

~ the last one standing ~

The corporate history is a long slide down the ladder of parent companies. Unitel separated from Samsung SDS in 2000, was re-established as UDS the following year, went into Daou Technology's group in 2003, renamed itself Unitel Networks in 2006 and was absorbed into Daou Technology outright in 2007. Nobody built it up during this period. It simply kept running, on a smaller and smaller budget, with a shrinking number of people who had never left.

By june 2015 every other PC통신 service in Korea had stopped, and Unitel was the last. It held that position for another seven years, which is the part that is difficult to explain to anyone who was not there. A dial-up-era walled garden kept serving customers in a country with some of the fastest domestic broadband in the world, because a few thousand people still wanted it and switching it off cost more attention than leaving it on.

~ what got buried with it ~

Daou Technology announced the shutdown on 6 march 2022 and ended service on 30 june, twenty-six years after Samsung SDS turned it on. The Korean press covered it as the death of PC통신 itself rather than of one company, which was accurate: there was nothing left behind it. The training institute that carries the Unitel name is still operating, which is the usual way these things end, with the least interesting part of the company outliving the part anybody remembers.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »