Japan: Snapshot of the Internet around 1990

2012.8.17/10.13/10.23/10.27

The following article is the summary of the two articles by Haruhisa Ishida and Jun Murai in 1992. [Ishida 1992, Murai 1992a]. The most numerical data are from Ishida’s article.

1. Domain names and IP addresses; 1986~1992

.jp country code top level domain (ccTLD) and IP address became available in Japan along other countries, and the domain name growth and IP address growth are shown in Figures 1 and 2, respectively.[Murai 1992a] Both of them show on academic community with .ac.jp, and commercial community with .co.jp.

Figure 1: Growth of the number of domains in Japan

Figure 2: Growth of the IP connected domains in Japan

More specifically, the following domain name allocations were registered by 1992.[Ishida 1992]

452 co companies

195 ac academic institutions

40 go government (laboratories)

39 or public organizations

10 ad network administration

1 ntt

1 nttdata

1 kek

(739 Total)

Both .jp domain name and IP address administration as well as .jp name server were administered by Japan Network Information Center (JNIC, which was later renamed to JPNIC).

JNIC was founded in 1991 through discussion at Japan Committee for Research Network (JCRN).

JCRN also elects Japanese delegates to CCIRN and IEPG.[Ishida 1992]

2. Networks

There were many Internets and Internet-related networks in Japan around 1990 including

WIDE with 58 domain names

WIDE uses TCP/IP protocol with international link of 192 Kbps to U. of Hawaii through PACCOM Project serving WIDE Project member institutions and company laboratories. WIDE Project has many active research projects, and formed over ten working groups including satellite communications, mobile network and security.

SINET with 9 domain names

SINEt is the backbone network maintained by NACSIS which was renamed as NII with international link of 136 Kbps to NASA Ames Laboratory serving universities.

NACSIS also operates N1net for the mainframe computers of some of national university computer centers which was developed in early 1980s. It also operates a national library network.

TISN with 17 domain names

TISN with international link of 128 Kbps to U. of Hawaii through PACCOM Project services Tokyo University and its affiliated institutions.

TISN supports both TCP/IP and DECNET. TISN and WIDE back up each other as they both use TCP/IP protocol.

TISN and HEPNET-J also back up each other as they both use DECNET protocol.

JAIN with 44 domain names

JAIN is an experimental academic Internet linking many universities with TCP/IP protocol over X.25. The international traffic was supported by NACSIS with SINET.

HEPNET-J

HEPNET-J with international link of 128 Kbps from KEK (High Energy Physics Laboratory in Tsukuba) to US HEPNET through Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California using DECNET. HEPNET-J supports high energy physics community in Japan.

BITNET-J with 118 nodes

BITNET with international link of 56 Kbp between BITNET-Japan through Science University of Tokyo and Princeton University in USA using BITNET protocol. It serves 82 universities in Japan, mostly private universities.

INET Club

INET Club is operated by KDD Laboratory for consortium of 205 JUNET member companies for overseas connection, in particular email using UUCP protocol.

3. Japanese Character Support

Non-English characters have problems since the Internet supports only ASCII code. Japanese characters along other Asian language characters pose even more complex problems. In Japan, the first development required is to support Japanese characters including Kanji characters (Chinese characters) through the 7-bit encoding scheme through JIS X0208 on Kanji code set, and JIS X0202 which is the same standard as ISO 2022.[Murai 1992] The first application with Japanese character support is the message exchange based on RFC822. Many other applications with Japanese character support followed.

4. Commercial Internet Service

Commercial Internet Service started with Internet Initiative Planning, Inc., which was founded in 1992, and changed its name to Internet Initiative Japan, Inc. (IIJ) in 1993, and started the Internet connectivity service late in 1993 followed by dialup service in 1994. Other Internet service providers started their Internet services in mid-1990s including NTT, KDD, and startup companies.