Before the era of Slack, Teams, and Google Drive, there was the intranet. And for thousands of employees at CJ Group (CheilJedang) and its subsidiaries, CJNet wasn't just a network; it was a digital universe.
October 26, 2023 Category: Tech Nostalgia / IT Life Before the era of Slack, Teams, and Google
So, pour one out for the old intranet. Rest in peace, CJNet. You were slow, but you were safe. Share your worst "password reset" story in the comments below! Rest in peace, CJNet
If you meant something else (like a specific gaming server or a software tool), just let me know and I’ll rewrite it! Life Behind the Wall: Nostalgia for the CJNet Intranet If you meant something else (like a specific
Today, we have hyperspeed cloud networks, but we also have "Shadow IT"—where employees use personal KakaoTalk or WhatsApp to share trade secrets because the corporate system is too annoying. CJNet was a walled garden. It was ugly, slow, and required a manual IT ticket to change your desktop background. But it was ours .
Here is my ode to the beige, clunky, yet groundbreaking world of the corporate intranet. Logging into CJNet was a ritual. You couldn’t just "connect to Wi-Fi." You had to launch a specific dialer (if you were remote) or a web proxy script. You had to remember a password that expired every 30 days and couldn’t contain a single syllable of your actual name.
On CJNet, a logistics manager could check inventory metrics while a marketing intern booked a screening room for a movie premiere. It was a centralized nervous system for a sprawling empire. We look back at networks like CJNet and laugh at the loading times (60 seconds to open an email) and the cryptic error codes ("Error 404: Permission Denied").