Tech Support at the Village

I arrived at Global Village Communication (there is no “s” at the end, which was always a point of contention, and a tidbit that will enter into a later story) in the midst of one of the crisis points in its history.

The monochrome version of the original company logo

I wish I could find a good version of the original color logo, but I cannot.  For later posts I will use the updated logo, which we used to call the Kid Pix logo because it was much simplified.

It was 1992 and the company had found some sudden success, but had dealt with it poorly.

The company started out in 1989 with their Teleport ADB modem for Macintosh, a 2400bps device that plugged into the Apple Desktop Bus port rather than a serial port, an important feature as the Mac, by default, had just two serial ports and if those were in use for something like, a printer, which everybody had, and something like that Farallon MacRecorder I mentioned in the last post, you had no place for a modem.  And modems were very much a coming thing at that point.

Well, fax modems were.

I mean, modems were getting popular for data in some areas, but things to log into were limited, had arcane and often bizarre interfaces, and, in the case of online services, were often pricey.

But everybody had a fax machine in 1989.  And the chipset that the first Teleport modem used had fax send and recieve capability, so the team looked into adding fax capability.  The modem already needed some special software to emulate a third serial port so apps could use it, so they expanded that to add the fax ability to it.

The software, dubbed GlobalFax, was light and fast and easy to use.  Its major claim to fame was that it allowed you to hold down a modifier key which would turn the Print function in an app into a Fax function, so if you knew how to print you knew how to fax.  That was often billed as a huge innovation of ours, though a competitor called Prometheus did it about a year before Global Village.

The back of the box GlobalFax copy

But they never called us out on it, likely because the had problems of their own.  Also, their fax software sucked.  In fact, relative to Global Village, everybody’s software sucked.  That was, in large part, because we were entirely a Macintosh shop and bought into the whole simplicity and “less is more” philosophy that ever Apple had a tough time adhering to… and their fax software sucked especially bad.

So the Teleport ADB earned the company a niche in the market.  Not enough to get rich off of, but enough to sustain the company until they could figure out something better.  They just needed the right moment, and it had presented itself in 1991 with the advent of the Macintosh PowerBook laptop computers.

The primary driving founder of the company, Rick, had a lot of contacts inside of Apple so Global Village was able to get itself lined up to produce a fax modem for this new laptop… and to link the popular GlobalFax software to it.

It was going to be a v.32 modem… meaning 9600bps.  The PowerBooks would all have an internal port onto which a modem could be attached, with an opening in the back for an RJ-11 phone jack to plug into, and this freed the company from the limits of the Apple Desktop Bus, which couldn’t handle much over 7K bps of data.  (The Teleport ADB said it was 2400bps data, 4800bps receive fax, 9600bps send fax, but I never got more than 7,200bps out of the fax send due to the ADB limitations.)

This gave Global Village the first high speed modem for the Apple Macintosh PowerBook computers, as they were officially named.  And Rick knew the importance of being first, so the initial modem out the door, the PowerPort v.32, was a compromise.

While the 2400bps modems available at launch, like Apple’s own Express Modem, fit nicely inside the PowerBook, only part of the PowerPort v.32 was within the computer.  Rather than an RJ-11 jack on the back, there was a special port where an external dongle containing the whole digital to analog predator (DAA)  was contained… that being the bit that turns the noise you hear on the phone line into a digital.

It was a necessary move because they DAA design the company wanted needed an new chipset from AT&T which was just becoming available and would have held back production, possibly allowing somebody else to be first.

Being first was absolutely the right move.  The PowerBook computers were an immediate hit.  People like to disdain Apple for being style over substance, but style sells when done right.  You can tell me that there were laptops before the PowerBook and you would be right.  You can also tell me there were smart phones before the iPhone, but nobody stood in a line that went around the block to get a Palm Treo or a Blackberry.

And the PowerBook itself set the style for laptops, with the trackpad and keyboard positioning and space to rest your hands on the unit as you typed.  People could sense in some way that this was just right and PowerBooks sold out immediately.

PowerPort v.32 modems also sold out, despite having a list price of $795.  CEOs and VPs were having their staff order PowerBook 170s, the top of the line, and wanted all the goodies.  RAM expansions, modems, you name it, if it was for the PowerBook line it was selling like no other in that moment.

I happened to be working at ComputerWare, as mentioned in the previous post, where I had stepped in as the tech for the Sunnyvale store when all this was going on.  So I spent a lot of time installing PowerPort v.32 modems in brand new PowerBooks.  We were also about three miles from the new Global Village offices on Middlefield Road and the big Mac only retailer in the valley, so the GV reps would come by to see how things were doing.

Global Village was able to move to new offices in Mountain View, from a sketchy location in Palo Alto… this was before home prices effectively eliminated the idea of sketchy areas in Palo Alto or Mountain View…  because of the boom caused by the PowerPort v.32.  They were expanding.

The proximity to our store got my boss to apply over at GV and then, he recommended me and I sat down with Rick, who was acting as VP of engineering and support, and he saw the dedicated enthusiast in me and I was hired.

This was the era of startup expansion where companies needed people, even amateur enthusiasts like myself, to propel growth.  Today I would never have gotten that job, the great wall of HR would have trashed any resume that did not have a computer science degree.  At my last job, the person who replaced me got the job because they had a masters degree in computer science, which was the “preferred” option on the job listing.  They were also on an H1-B visa so would be locked to the company for a few years at a lower salary than my own.

But back in 92, an enthusiastic amateur had a shot.  So I jumped in and started in tech support just as the crisis was hitting the company.

The VCs had insisted that the company now needed a “real” CEO, which in VC speak often means a sinecure for one of their buddies.  The founders have done the work, now the VCs need to get paid.  In this case the new CEO, who was let go the week I started, had fucked up in that way that so many VC appointed CEOs do.  He didn’t know the company, he didn’t know the product line, all he wanted to do was turn the place into a “real” company, which meant better offices, better furniture, art on the walls (the more expensive the art is on the walls, the worse the CEO is), and chairs.

Big, black, expensive wooden guest chairs for everybody’s office and cube.  More than 100 of them as I recall.  Though they were some other color to start with, so he had them painted black right before they were delivered, so they turned the offices into a toxic zone as the fumes from the freshly painted chairs made being inside the building untenable.

Meanwhile, the next round of modems was behind because all of this superficial nonsense was screwing things up.  We needed to get the next round of PowerPort modems out the door and get desktop companion set of modems finished to fill out the demand for our fax software combined with a high speed modem.

So the CEO was fired, Rick was given free reign over the technical side of the company to right the ship, and within the first month there was a big layoff… my second Silicon Valley layoff, but the first of many I would survive over the next two decades.  In a classic HR gaff, they didn’t quite get to everybody who was being laid off, so in the middle of the survivors meeting they had to pull my direct supervisor aside and let him know he was out.

Rick’s ad hoc solution to running support was to put myself and Yuji, another ComputerWare alum, in charge to figure it out.  We quickly split into personnel and technical responsibilities, with Yuji being the boss and dealing with problem customers, at which he excelled, and myself being the technical second line support person to figure out complex issues… or not so complex issues, as the a lot of the team answering the phones was not even very computer savvy, much less modem knowledgeable.

I set up a quick ad hoc BBS to allow people to download software updates, something rather amazingly overlooked at a modem company.  I also set up an AppleTalk Remote Access server that people could dial into for updates as well, as that was often easier than teaching people how to use the absolute garbage terminal emulator software we were including in the box.  And I set about pestering Rick to get somebody to Dave Alverson’s ZTerm terminal emulator app bundled with our modems because it was light and easy and supported the ZModem file transfer protocol which would auto start and complete file transfers without the need for user action.

I don’t remember who actually reached out and set that up, I just felt good that we were paying somebody for a good package rather than throwing in free bloatware into the box.  I don’t think this made Dave Alverson rich or anything, but I was glad he got the money.  And whenever somebody would come by and ask the support team if they would be okay if we replaced ZTerm with some other free package… which was usually a pared down install that users could pay to upgrade… they would respond with a universal negative.

I also became the liaison between engineering and support, which meant going upstairs to where the coding and testing happened.  That wasn’t always smooth, because I was an opinionated end user, but I was also willing to sit up there after hours and prove my point.  I wrestled with somebody up there about spending a few more cents on a cable that had the carrier detect pin available as the high speed desktop modems, the Teleport Silver and Gold, 9600 and 14,400bps respectively, were being developed.

I used one of the beta units on my BBS for a while and used the Hermes software to demonstrate the functionality of the carrier detect pin and how its lack could screw things up for any serious modem user.  I pushed so hard on that issue that I am surprised they didn’t mention it specifically on the box.  It was important to me.

The Teleport Gold data sheet

At the end of that, when we finally shipped the Teleport Silver and Gold… the Teleport ADB was renamed the Teleport Bronze (not to be confused with the Teleport Bronze II, about which there is a whole different story) to fill out the medals lineup and to match the now shipping PowerPort Bronze, Silver, and Gold modems… I was upstairs permanently, on the QA team.  I think my name even went into the GlobalFax credits.

Once again, I was the modem nerd, the person who went home at night and did stuff online, in a group of often much more technically trained and accomplished individuals, for whom the modem was just a product.

I still have a beta Teleport Gold in a drawer, the ones with the gold LED lights, as opposed to the red LEDs that went into production models.  And I still have, on a shelf in my office, a new, in box, still shrink wrapped, Teleport Gold.

The big box of modem

That isn’t a first production run box.  I didn’t even think to keep the one they gave me in box when it shipped, instead opening it up to use it… even though I had access to all the modems I wanted.  To be in my 20s once more.  That is a later edition package that I picked up after the fact when I realized I didn’t have any of the products I worked on new and in box.  That said, I know my name is in the credits of all the software in this package.  I spent a lot of time on the GlobalFax OCR software.

I have loose samples of other projects I worked on… I’ll have to dig out a drawer full of PowerBook modems of various flavors to take a picture at some point… but this really felt like the first one.