A tale of the rise and fall of a market leader. Most of this is from memory. Any errors are most likely due to these memories being about 30 years old. This is also less a personal tale than being a witness to a tiny bit of Silicon Valley history.
I mentioned in my previous post that Global Village was first out of the gate with a high speed… which at the time meant 9600bps v.32… modem for the initial Apple PowerBook computers back in 1991.
Global Village Communication – The Later Logo
Apple itself could only muster a 2400bps modem, designed by their hardware team in France, and another couple of competitors were out there, also with 2400bps modems based on a Rockwell chipset that Global Village also used for the later PowerPort Bronze 2400bps modem.
The PowerPort V.32, with its external phone interface dongle, was a stop gap measure, a way to be first on the market with a high speed PowerBook modem. But any advantage gained by it could have been squandered if somebody had come along and shipped a high speed modem that did not have that ridiculous, often lost or mislaid, external unit.
GV and some competitors were racing to get there and a number of companies had announced their modems in advance of shipping, preparing the sales channel for the coming products. GV, of course, announced their PowerPort Bronze, Silver, and Gold modems, which ran at 2400bps, 9600bps, and 14,400bps respectively. 14.4K, or v.32bis, was the current speed hotness and the first out the door with a modem running at that speed could have easily swept up the market and made it their own.
GV managed to do that, managed to get a set of new, all internal, modems out the door, including the 14.4K model, which was also list priced $200 below the $795 PowerPort V.32.
A PowerPort Gold Modem
How that happened is a an odd story. GV was, at the time, small and light on its feet and was pushing all out to get that. But so were some of its competitors. I recall us getting some internal info about a company called PSI something… PSI Computer or Research or Peripherals, I forget… and how they had actually been ahead of us, with a 14.4K modem ready to ship well before GV.
The thing is, Ingram Micro’s sales and order data showed the largest demand for GV PowerPort Silver, the 9600bps model, by a wide margin. This was a fluke due to there being many back orders for the PowerPort V.32, which were naturally routed to the equivalent replacement product, the PowerPort Silver.
PSI hadn’t considered making a 9600bps modem. There was really no need. The current Rockwell and AT&T chip sets small enough for the PowerPort modem slot were 14.4K spec. There was no 9600bps chip set. The PowerPort Silver was just a PowerPort Gold with firmware that limited its data speed.
A PowerPort Silver Modem
But the fact that Ingram Micro was reporting huge demand for the Silver was said to have freaked them out a bit and the reportedly second guessed themselves and delayed shipping their high speed modems until they had a 9600bps model.
That turned out to be a very bad move. The delay allowed GV to get to market ahead of them and, once the Bronze/Silver/Gold modems were in the channel, the Gold was the big seller. Almost nobody bought a Silver because if you were cheap you bought the Bronze and if you wanted high speed you spent the extra $100 list price for the Gold.
Global Village won. There were some competitors out there, but their effect on the market was small. They didn’t have the cachet of the Global Village brand or the GlobalFax software.
But Apple didn’t sit on their hands with the original PowerBook models for too long. There were upgrades of the basic design that used the same modem slot, but they had a vision for future laptops. Those would be the PowerBook Duo and the PowerBook 500 series.
The PowerBook 500 series might have been the sexiest laptops created in the 90s. They were fast, with a curved shell and a pair of battery slots, one of which could be swapped out for some utility options, it looked like a laptop Batman might use. And the sexiest of the bunch was the PowerBook 550s, the Japan-only models, that dumped the middle gray plastic that had been the standard since the PowerBooks launched for a semi-gloss black that just dialed the look of the unit up to eleven.
And then there was the PowerBook Duo series, which was mostly hot garbage based on a flawed idea.
The idea actually doesn’t sound bad. The plan was to design the minimal sized laptop they could manage, discarding as many ports and all drive options from the base unit. That way you could have a computer that didn’t need a big bag… the PowerBook 500s were hefty beasts… and if you needed connectivity you would just plug it into one of several increasingly impractical docking solutions. The Micro dock was useful, the Mini dock was a bit awkward, and the full on Duo Dock… think of an Easy Bake Oven that you slide your Duo into with a monitor on top so it becomes an awkwardly proportioned desktop machine… was problematic at best.
Still, the Duo could have gotten away with being useful with the Micro dock had it not been slow, had it not lacked a color screen option for the first year, and had it not been a flimsy piece of garbage overall.
These problems were all solved over time, and when the series finally made it to the 280c and 2300c models it was actually a decent machine. I used to hog the 280c at the office for my own use. By then, however, it was too late.
But this isn’t about PowerBooks, but about PowerBook modems, and with these two new model lines Apple was throwing out the simple serial port design of the initial series for an architecture that Apple Paris had come up with to drive a NuBus based modem design for the initial Macintosh II computers and had been fiddling with ever since.
This was seen as Apple Paris trying to get what they felt was their rightful spot in the Apple hardware universe back. They did not like GV and we were told we were referred to as the “Global Villains” at the Apple Paris offices.
Rick, one of the founders I mentioned last post, had his inside sources and his own fans at the Cupertino headquarters, and was give then opportunity to present an alternative option based on the architecture that had already been decided upon. He had heard that the Apple Paris design was called the Dart Modem, so he got our hardware and software wizards to put together a prototype which was dubbed the Valiant, because he was a car guy and the Plymouth version of the Dodge Dart was the Valiant.
It was built on an oversized fab based off of the TelePort Gold desktop modem, with a series of “blinky lights” to impress onlookers… I kid you not… and we managed to pull it together in an incredibly short time and demo it for Apple. They were impressed and we were back in contention.
As it turned out, the Dart modem design, which we got to see at one point, was more expensive than what we came up with and we got the nod first to be certified for install and then to be a factory installed option for the PowerBook 500 series. And so the PowerPort Mercury for the PowerBook 500 series went to market and was extremely profitable.
Mercury? What happened to Bronze, Silver, and Gold?
Well, time moved on and higher speeds had always been on the horizon. In the Silver and Gold manuals we actually mentioned a coming Platinum model based on what was referred to as the in progress v.Fast protocol, which would eventually become v.34, the 28.8K standard. But that was taking time and people wanted some speed boost. Rockwell was offering some interim chip set options, but we went with AT&T’s v.32terbo plan, which was a 19.2K speed that was supported by some modems. Fortunately US Robotics, in their obsessive need to support all standards on their high end Courier modems, adopted it as well, so we had some support.
Anyway, we’ll get to the speed and protocol wars in another post. At this point Global Village was probably at its pinnacle. Being the go-to, pre-installed choice for the PowerBook 500 series in North America made the company a lot of money.
And for people who didn’t get the modem pre-installed, we had a box on the shelf for them. This was good times for GV. The money was rolling in.
This is actually the box I have sitting around the house still
Though, installing the modem yourself… not recommended. The main board with the chipset was easy enough. It had a connector under the keyboard along with the memory expansion slot. A couple of screws, off comes the keyboard, and Steve’s your uncle.
This bit is easy to install
The phone interface… or, correctly the digital to analog adapter or DAA… well… not so easy.
The DAA… a seemingly simple little thing
If the manufacturing process for the PowerBook 500 series had 100 steps, installing the DAA would probably have been somewhere around step 7. You have to pull the whole thing apart, risking several rather delicate and very easily torn ribbon cables to get that sucker installed.
At one point I had installed more GV PowerBook 500 series modems than anybody in the world… and I only ripped one of those ribbon cables. Still, if you had an Apple certified tech do it, then you were probably okay. And those boxes on the shelf were even more profitable than the ones pre-installed by Apple. As I said, good times.
The back of the PowerPort 500 Mercury Box
The modem for the Duo however… we should have just passed on that. Not only did we not sell out the first production run of those modems, we spent a lot more time trying to get it to work than the effort was worth. I know I have on in a drawer somewhere, but I haven’t found it. So I went looking on the internet for a picture of it… and I found three, all very low res.
Mercury Duo… that is what the MD stands for
The problem was that the Duo design had a special layout for a modem that hooked up to the units power manager chip. This meant that we had to put, and pass through, the units power button by putting one on our modem. The power button is the red thing on the blurry picture above.
It also meant that anything that we did which generated an error in the power manager simply powered off the whole device.
I spent six months at work every day for at least 12 hours working with the hardware and software devs to come up with reproducible scenarios that we could then take over to a Duo we had hooked up to a logic analyzer so that we could see the problem, because that was only way to capture the state of the device.
We did, eventually find the problem and fix it, but not before my girlfriend dumped me and moved in with somebody else because I was never home except to sleep. I had declare that I would not shave or get a haircut until we solve that issue. That was in November, so in late May when we finally did, I was pretty shaggy.
Most of the team when we were done – me, front row on the right
Typical of crunch, while it kept me up all hours and wrecked my personal life, it wasn’t necessarily useful either. As I noted, we spent a lot of time playing NBA Jam in the lab on my Sega Genesis while we waited for the hardware guys to tell is if, this time, they had caught the error on the logic analyzer.
The team was so burned out that we basically spent the summer pretending to work. As I said, this effort was pretty much for nothing when it came to sales, though the fact that we said we would do a modem for both the 500 series and Duo PowerBooks was a large part of why we got the deal.
Both modems were so convoluted in design and integration that we had no competition. It was 100% our market in the US and in a lot of overseas markets. We were riding high.
Then came the next round of laptops from Apple, the PowerBook 5300 and 190 series.
I still have a PowerBook 190cs, the last Motoroloa 68040 model launched by Apple before the PowerPC chips took over.
Apple, in designing these, decided to get away from the custom, built-in modem port idea and adopted the PC Card as their modem and network connectivity plan. In fact, the ports on the back were pretty minimal.
Sound jack, SCSI port, serial port, and ADB port
Not pictured, the completely under-utilized infrared communications port.
At the time PC Cards were called PCMCIA cards, but as far as we were concerned that stood for “People Can’t Memorize Common Industry Acronyms” and the working group that created the standard changed the name.
This was the last hurrah of Global Village. We brought out a series of PC cards with the Gold, Platinum, and Platinum Pro designations, the pro version being a mode + Ethernet combo card.
Image borrowed from the Internet
There was even some sort of cell phone interface being worked on, though I cannot recall if we ever shipped that. I did not work on the PC Cards. I was off working on the modems that were being sold with the Macintosh Performa computers, which is a tale for another post.
The PC Cards did well enough. They kept the company going, but more based on brand acceptance than anything else. At this point Global Village was THE name for PowerBook modems.
But the PC Card standard was open and there were suddenly a lot of possible competitors. The end of four years of almost total dominance of the PowerBook modem market was coming to an end. The key differentiator in 1991, the GlobalFax software, was starting to become somewhat irrelevant. Fax, while still having another decade of life left in it, was no longer as important to the average user. Everybody wanted to connect to this new World Wide Web thing or send email with documents attached.
That put Global Village in the middle of the general modem market. The Macintosh market was a special little bubble where you could charge a premium. The wide open PC modem market was cut-throat and extremely price sensitive. Cheap and somewhat reliable owned the market and any company that wanted big sales numbers had to have a bargain basement model.
And Apple, after going down the PC Card route began eventually just building the modem in themselves. Moore’s Law got everything you needed for modem, fax, and whatever else down to pretty much a single chip.
I’ll get to the end of Global Village in another post. But this was the beginning of the end, when the company wasn’t able to lock itself into a premium market and had to compete with the likes of Zoom and Boca and Supra and the low end models from US Robotics. All the modem manufacturers would be in the lurch eventually, but first the premium market had to fail.
Telephony Tales so far:
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Where I grew up and went to college, in Louisiana, there was practically no penetration of Macs. I worked in building and repairing PCs for my college years (1995-1999) and the only macs I knew of were in education and specialized applications like yearbook and newspaper.
That said, I clearly remember the 2400 baud-28.8k race around that time, but usually went US Robotics.
One question: was this the first Jobs era, interregnum, or second Jobs era? I roughly know the history there but don’t know specifics.
LikeLike
@Archey – This was during Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio, the days of dumb… and I’ll get to a some of that dumb soon. By the time of the second coming of Steve I was working on Windows PC because having Macintosh on your resume was a liability.
LikeLike
Just want to say how much I appreciate these tales. Thanks for sharing!
LikeLike
Actually, they called us “The Globule Villain” (not Global Villain) — or maybe that was just the French pronunciation. ^_^ But anyway, so much for the Apple France ATG after we shipped Raven with operational word DMA on a buggy Apple HardRock ASIC. Their 5xx modem was called “BabyRock,” but Apple used Raven as their internal modem solution for the PB500s. I guess I was on vacation the day of that picture. Oh well.
LikeLike
My memory, 30 years removed, says I didn’t see you from when Saturn shipped in May until summer ended. I remember most of us being burnt out enough at that point that very little work got done over the summer in any case. A lot of going through the motions.
LikeLike