TWICS (Two Way Information Communication System) was a Japanese

Internet Service Provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

and

online community An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, online communities may fe ...

. It was started in 1982 as a part of the non-profit International Education Center in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

. Between 1982 and 1993, TWICS focused on their online community.

Howard Rheingold Howard Rheingold (born 1947) is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a t ...

wrote about their diverse international online community in his book,

The Virtual Community ''The Virtual Community'' is a 1993 book about virtual communities by Howard Rheingold, a member of the early network system The WELL. A second edition, with a new concluding chapter, was published in 2000 by MIT Press. The book's discussion ...

Joi Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Law School. Ito has re ...

contributed ideas that led to the growth of the community, both as a teenager and later as president of PSINet Japan. Prior to TWICS offering public access Internet, Jeff Shapard led the company and developed the foundation for the community . Until the mid-1990s, TWICS based their community on the Participate conferencing system running on a

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The VA ...

computer from

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

. In 1993 TWICS became the first organization in Japan to offer public access Internet services by leasing a line from a US-owned company called InterCon International KK (a subsidiary of TCP/IP software maker, InterCon Systems Corporation). After Jeff Shapard left TWICS, Tim Burress took over as president, leading the company through the complex regulatory process in Japan, and was chief engineer that led the project to successful connection to the public Internet. This achievement made them a target of intense rivalry from older more established companies who had already spent a year unsuccessfully trying to obtain licenses to provide similar services.

TWICS and Linux in Japan

Starting from 1995, TWICS started to move their systems to HPUX under the technical leadership of Paul Gampe. Under Paul's leadership, TWICS also started to move edge systems to Linux. Paul later became VP of global engineering services and operations at Red Hat after leaving TWICS. Kevin Baker, another senior engineer at TWICS, worked at Red Hat as an engineering manager for 8 years. The Tokyo Linux Users Group (TLUG) was formed in the TWICS forum. Craig Oda, who was president of TWICS at the time was also president of the TLUG and co-authored an O'Reilly Japan book on Japanese support of Linux. Craig went on to become VP of product marketing and management at Turbolinux.

Acquisition by PSINet

In 1998,

PSINet PSINet, based in Northern Virginia, was one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) and was involved in the commercialization of the Internet until the company's bankruptcy in 2001 during the dot-com bubble and acquisition by Coge ...

acquired TWICS as part of their expansion into Japan. Rimnet was acquired at the same time. After the dot-com bubble popped, Cable & Wireless IDC acquired PSINet Japan along with TWICS in December 2001. ."Cable & Wireless acquires PSINet Japan"
(January 28, 2002) Lightwave. In 2003, TWICS was taken over by Inter.net Global Inc.

External links

The controversial start-up of Internet services in Japan
TWICS.com
at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Chapter from Howard Rheingold's book, The Virtual Community

Computing Japan

References

{{Reflist Defunct Internet service providers Defunct companies of Japan Internet service providers of Japan