The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems

As I wrote in the last installment, Global Village was not blind to the fact that modems were going to cease to be a viable business for the company in just a few years.  Moore’s Law was already in play turning the chip sets for modems from the most expensive component in 1991 to a trivial expense in just a few years.  By the end of the decade modems would be a commodity. You knew things were going that way when Rockwell, one of the primary modem chip set manufacturers, introduced Baudman as their mascot, a hero who was keen to deliver one simple message.

Sing it Baudman

It should tell you something that the saved image I had for Baudman was a GIF, and not an animated one.  I went looking on Google to see if I could find a better version of this image, but all I could find was a 1995 LA Times article referencing this ad campaign from Rockwell.  Our modem nerd heritage is being erased.

Apple, our bread and butter market for modems, would offer a USB dongle modem for a trivial amount of money on its laptops eventually, a built-in EtherNet port being a far more important aspect of laptop design by then.  That market was soon to be dead to us.  Time to go elsewhere.  But where?

Attempts to move beyond modems pre-dated my joining the company in 1992, and the OneWorld network fax/server was among the earliest.

The Global Village OneWorld

This was not a particularly successful product.  We sold enough for it to count as a second product line in order to go public, but it was never going to sustain the company.  You can read a bit about its launch thanks to the TidBits Macintosh Newsletter archive.

As a bit of proof on that front, in order to find the images above I had to go to eBay, where exactly one unit was for sale.  The formerly $1,500 device back in 1994… this one has EtherNet, so it was probably $2,500, because the cheaper originals were LocalTalk only… LocalTalk being the 230Kbps networking built into Macintosh models since the Mac Plus… and there were exactly zero images available on Google.  I was half tempted to buy it for the $25 “Buy Now!” price.  But then what would I do with yet another piece of old computer junk?  Connect to it with the PowerMac 8500 still sitting in the back of my office closet? (I don’t even have an ADB mouse or keyboard anymore, so good luck with that.)

You can, by the by, see the two angled ports in the back where the PowerPort modems would be plugged into the motherboard of the device to act as the dial in/out connections.

One of these for each slot

So OneWorld was a vision that never quite developed into much.  It carried its own weight, but never coalesced into anything major, in part because MSDOS and Windows networking was so bizarro world behind at the time that we couldn’t expand it beyond Macs, and that was not a big market for network devices beyond printers.

And yet, OneWorld was the second best idea that the company came up with.  So I guess it is time to go through some of the others.

This post was greatly assisted by the fact that I had a web site back in 2000 where I recorded much of this information when it was all much more fresh in my head.  The web site is gone, but I still have the Microsoft FrontPage files for it… who remembers FrontPage… and the internet archive as reference points.

Expansion into the Windows Market

I mentioned GV trying to get into the Windows PC market previously.  Attempting that with modems alone was going nowhere.  The feeling was that, like the Mac market, GV needed a software package that would go with it that would allow us to sell our modems at a premium price.

GV ended up buying up a Marietta, Georgia based company called SofNet that made a Windows 3.1 fax software package called FaxWorks.  Again, eBay is the only place to find much information.

FaxWorks Pro disks, pre-acquisition

GV turned around and tried to make a go of it under its own brand, but the problem was if we were able to buy the company, then it probably wasn’t doing as well as we were.

Now with the GV name attached

This culminated in a new product called FocalPoint produced by the team in Marietta.

Welcome to FocalPoint

This was an ambitious all-in-one product that attempted to bring together email, fax, terminal emulation, voice mail, and even internet services… like, I think it had a web browser built into it.

It sure as hell supported Gopher, I know that much!

Actually, looking at the details, it lumped in the Quarterdeck version of NCSA Mosaic as part of the package.

Some of the fine print

I have absolutely no idea what became of this software package.  We used to refer to it as FecalPoint… though I can’t recall if it was actually bad or if that was just one of the nicknames we used to give everything.  That was part of the early GV tradition of our founder, Rick, who gave everything a nickname.  But the company tried to ride that and our hardware into yet another failed attempt to break into the Windows market.

Making a Plug And Play joke on boxer shorts showed we were serious

Seriously, we gave those boxers out at trade shows.  I don’t know how they went over or if anybody wore them, but that was marketing’s big idea.

I do know that SofNet was quietly spun off from GV at some point, becoming a company called SNet FaxWorks.  The FaxWorks name shows up as part of some OEM software included with Gateway computers among others into the early 2000s.

There was also a company called The Keller Group that did an OS/2 version of FaxWorks, though that probably fell down the well since the IBM marketing line that OS/2 ran Windows software better than Windows absolutely killed all OS/2 specific software.  Why would you bother if the Windows version ran fine?

So that ended up being no help in the long term.

Registration Plus

One of Global Village’s spiffy bits of software was its registration system.  When you bought a modem and hooked it up, we let you register it by just dialing into a server and sending us your information.  We promised all sorts of things, including sending users regular software updates on floppies in the mail, something that I am sure we intended to do when we had a few hundred users, but when it was over a million then the postage alone would have sunk us.  Nobody got any floppies sent to them unless they called up and demanded them.

Instead we just collect a bunch of data that marketing ineptly used to send out ads… I say ineptly because they couldn’t even be bothered to purge the obvious test data so they’d do a mailing a couple hundred of them would show up back at the office because we had hoped they wouldn’t be so dumb as to do that.  Go figure.

Anyway, we had this software that only did this one thing and somebody in the executive suite figured we should really have it do more than that.  It should be its own product and… I forget at this point, but there was a dumb to naive vision of it being a thing.

Some minor amount of money and resources were devoted to this and… nothing ever came of it… mostly because it was an attempt to get something for… if not nothing, then for as little as possible.  Complete waste of time.

Global Center

This was the one true long term success, and one that has pretty much disappeared from the internet, not in small part because there are about a million things that are the “global center” of this, that, or the other thing.

This was the company’s attempt to latch onto this whole internet thing that was coming into its own around 1995.  The initial idea was to rebrand some existing hardware… as I recall the OEM product was something like the Motorola NetHopper… that was a router with a modem that would automatically dial out and connect you to the internet when you opened up a browser, tried to check your email, or otherwise tried to access the net so as to simulate an always on connection without trying up your phone line all the time.  Though, as I have pointed out previously, why not just go get another phone line at that point?

This caused some bad blood, in part because they went out of house for the hardware when we had the OneWorld already available and what they were trying to do wouldn’t have been much of a reach with it, but mostly because the guy running this new group was a jerk to us, derided the rest of the company despite it giving him the money for his project, and actively tried to keep his team from having any interaction with the rest of the company.  Also, his idea was dumb.

But then they just gave up and decided to become an internet service provider, got the VCs that still controlled the board to spin them off under the name Global Center, managed to get bought by a major ISP at the time which made all their stock options worth a ton of money at the height of the dot com boom.  A couple of people I knew who went off with them bought homes for cash and were set for life.  But it didn’t help Global Village one whit, it was just the VCs using one company they still had sway over to finance another way to make them more money before they left it all behind.

In the end it all crashed after the dot com boom and hardly anybody knows what an ISP was these days.

NewsCatcher

To explain Newscatcher I fear I am going to have to explain a bit about pagers.

In the 80s to the early 90s a pager was a simple thing.  You dialed a phone number, it went beep beep beep, then you punched in the numbers you wanted to send to the pager… probably a phone number, but codes were used too… and you hung up.  In a few minutes the page corresponding to the number would beep or buzz and the numbers you entered would show up on a little screen.

I actually had a pager for work for a while, though the only time anybody every used it was to occasionally send me 5318008 from the lab.

But as we got into the mid to late 90s, pagers became more sophisticated.  Again, Moore’s Law meant you could put more capability into the same space as time went on, and pagers that you could send text messages to… not SMS, but something not far from it… from a computer.  There were even two way pagers that allowed simple, pre-set responses.  As the capability ramped up the pager companies began looking for was to cheaply add more value to them and they came up with a news feed that could be pushed to your alphanumeric capable pager.  You could get AP headlines with a bit of text associated with them.  Pager news was a thing for a bit.

Some bright spark at GV… and this was after I had left, so I only heard about this second hand at a bi-weekly cards night that a group of us kept going for about a dozen years, from the mid-90s well into the 2000s… decided to make a desktop radio receiver that could hook up to your PC and get you pager news direct to a window on your desktop.  And so the NewsCatcher was born.

Of course they printed shirts for it, all projects got shirt…except Registration Plus

The company came out with a $150 device that hooked up to a serial port on your Windows PC, needed a power brick to run, and which would bring you news headlines for just a $6/month subscription fee.

Also, it was shaped like a pyramid because why not make the whole thing as awkward as possible?

The glory of NewsCatcher

This was a colossal misuse of money and resources, a comically bad waste of time that no doubt hastened Global Village towards its inevitable demise.

Among the many unforgivable sins of this thing was that it launched after a service called PointCast was already live.  Yes, PointCast sucked and was bad at what it did, but it didn’t cost $150 to install and require a monthly subscription.  Meanwhile, the NewsCatcher’s headlines included a link to the story that you could open in your browser… which meant you had to have a connection to the internet to see anything besides headlines, and if you had that why would you need NewsCatcher?

The word was that the company built a huge number of these before the holiday season and then sold almost none of them and eventually sold them as scrap to be salvaged for parts that could be re-sold for other uses.

And the company that bought them up was none other than Tut Systems, which had the most appropriate logo for that job possible.

Tut Systems

That was so on the nose at the time that I wondered if that was just some side company founded specifically for the job as some sort of tax dodge.  But no, Tut Systems had been around since the 80s and even made some communications gear such as ISDN terminal adapters… which leads us to the grand finale I suppose.

ISDN Modems

In the early to mid 90s there was a lot of assumptions that ISDN would be the next step after modems.  ISDN had a lot going for it compared to modems.  As I noted in the last post, an analog modem is limited to 56Kbps in throughput on analog phone lined.

Residential ISDN, as envisioned and planned in the 80s, would offer 128Kbps.  And not just a promise of that speed as with modems, but actual 128Kbps delivered.  ISDN is a digital connection, so technically isn’t a modem since there is no MOdulation or DEModulation.  It wasn’t transmitting data with sound, but via a pair of 64Kbps digital lines… the B channels… with signalling done on a third 16Kbps line… the D channel.

It was fast, reliable, low latency, and if a voice call came it the connection would tear down one of the 64Kbps channels to take the incoming call and ring an analog phone connected to the ISDN terminal adapter… that being the bit that could send data to your computer or voice to your handset.

I’ll dig into a bunch more about ISDN in a later post.  But it was so much better than mere modems.  I had ISDN when EverQuest came out and despite running at just 64Kbps for my data connection… again, I’ll get into why later… I would load zones so fast if I was in a group I would always be waiting for everybody else on dial up to zone in.

So GV invested time and money in developing an ISDN solution.  We had a team working on it for a couple of years.  We bought a company in the UK called KNX that made ISDN gear in order to speed us along. (KNX didn’t stand for anything, it was just supposed to be said as “connects.”)

Tiny KNX logo

The company was working on this while I was working on PowerBook modems, while I was working on Performa modems, when eWorld launched, after eWorld died, after we shipped PC Card modems, after I left the company, and presumably until the whole company fell over and died.  It never built a single ISDN product for sale… though, even if it had, that wouldn’t have saved it.  As I said, we’ll get to that.

The Road to Oblivion – OneWorld at a Time

With all of that failing, the company now losing money, and the modem market headed towards an entirely predictable conclusion, Global Village opted to get out of the modem market entirely.

They sold all of the modem products and the Global Village name… arguably the most valuable piece of the deal… to Boca Research for $10 million.  This was announced in the local paper on April 1, 1998.

San Jose Mercury News – April 1, 1998

That tale was distributed as a news wire story that ran pretty much the same at other sources such as Wired.

A company that had $90.2 million in revenue in 1997 sold its primary revenue source, including its brand, for just $10 million in 1998.  Granted, that the company LOST almost $40 million with that much revenue shows just how badly the place was being run.  It had all the hallmarks of Silicon Valley stupidity, where the CEO wanted valuable art on the walls so the place would impress investors while remaining ambivalent, and often completely ignorant, about the products they were trying to sell and the markets in which they had to compete.

I have strong opinions about companies that favor fancy art on the walls now.

Having sold the main business line and the name, the whole thing changed over to become OneWorld Systems.

OneWorld Systems

The stock ticker was changed from GVIL to OWLD.  The hope was that they could slim down and make something of the OneWorld network appliances aimed at small business users.  But the internet was already a thing.  Any small business investing in network infrastructure was probably going to go with always on internet at the office.  I haven’t worked some place where you couldn’t get out to Yahoo or, later, Google, since 1992.

So that all came to naught.  There was an active crew attempting to run a pump and dump in the Yahoo stocks forum with GVIL, constantly making things up and talking about the bright future the company had.  For anybody who has seen cryto scammers or people trying to milk just another bit of cash out of GameStop stock, this would all sound familiar.

In the end the company fell over and was done at some point a year later.  There was no Y2K issues with Global Village.  It never made it to the new millennium.

The name lived on for a bit.  Boca turned around and sold the name to Zoom which had managed to acquire quite a range of premium modem logos, including the once mighty Hayes Microcomputer Products, the arguably pioneer company of the modem boom.  Not bad for an upstart, low price brand that made my second modem, and my first 2400bps modem, back in the 80s.

My first two modems, Apple 1200bps and Zoom 2400bps

Oh, and that Zoom… not the Zoom you’re probably thinking about.  The modem company stagnated in the post modem era, used the Motorola brand on some of its cable modems at one point, and changed its name to Minim Inc. in 2020.  So the Zoom teleconferencing software, which was so ubiquitous during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 that the name became a verb, that is a different company altogether.

By then the Global Village name was mostly a memory.

Global Village Communication – 1989 to 1999.

The old Global Village logo

I found a box of my old GV business cards so grabbed the old logo from that with my phone.

Another Silicon Valley company that found success once, then couldn’t find it again.

The telephone series so far:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village
• Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market
• The Death of eWorld
• The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
• When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village