Mimic 2001-2009
09 Oct 2009
Mimic (i-Mimic) i-mode emulator in early 2001
History
Back in 2001 during the heady early days of the mobile web, Docomo rewarded my development efforts with a very nasty bill of packet charges. At that time there were approximately zero i-mode development tools or emulators so I began work on an i-mode parser intended to be used internally at the office to help reduce my heavy subsidization of all things Docomo.
The internal version was pretty rough, just handling emoji and stripping out unsupported HTML, but other developers got wind of it and asked if I wouldn't mind putting it online. This involved a lot of enhancements to the parser and getting it to handle external sites before wrapping it up in a web GUI that emulated mobile navigation and provided a source viewer and packet charge information.
It was launched early 2001 as i-Mimic, a play on 'i-mode', but later changed to Mimic when the whole prefixing an 'i' to all things technological got out of hand. With the i-mode parser stripping out so much HTML and resizing images, traffic into my poor little web server soon exceeded traffic out prompting an unwelcome move to a more flexible but expensive hosting plan. As it was the only online i-mode emulator at the time, traffic continued to grow and, somewhat surprisingly, increasingly from developers outside Japan including a little search company called Google who kindly sent me a t-shirt for my efforts that I'm never allowed to wear outside the house.
After the initial meteoritic success of i-mode, whoever was in charge of advancing i-mode web standards at Docomo must have started coming in late and going home early because i-mode web specs stagnated so apart from adding support for European i-mode user-agent and emoji mapping, Mimic remained largely unchanged since its 2001 release.
Retirement
Docomo finally woke up to the advances happening in the mobile web elsewhere when it released a second-generation mobile browser with advanced CSS and JavaScript support mid-2009. Upgrading Mimic to support this browser involves a tremendous amount of work and given Docomo offers is own i-mode HTML Simulator, after eight years I've decided it's time to put Mimic to rest.
