YoYo Mechanic

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I was chatting with another member of the Big Island team a couple of months back and shared with him that one of my biggest regrets of the whole venture is that we had such a huge concentration of talent… literally some of the smartest developers I have ever worked with in my life… and we invested our time in the YoYo.

Yo-yos used to market the YoYo

Again, hindsight, but there we were in 1996 with a software team that could have made anything happen sitting on the precipice of the internet age and the DotCom bubble, and we were not building something like Pets.com or some other online presence that could have been huge, or at least could have gone public and made us all rich before imploding after Y2K.  It was the age when eBay and Amazon and Yahoo were in still in their origin story phases and the road ahead was paved with cash for any dumb idea that included a web interface.

And we chose to make a called ID device.  In Silicon Valley.  At this moment in history.

For the third, and I hope final time, hindsight is an exact science.  Things were in play before hand, we had a path forward, that it would crumble to dust in our hands was yet to be determined.

Though I will say, there were signs.  I made a point of saying we were in Silicon Valley, in the central coast area of California, a state which, at that time, had not yet even allowed the phone companies in its jurisdiction to offer caller ID as a service to residential and business customers on the public phone network.

At this point I suppose I am going to have to write some words about caller ID and the state of play in the back half of the 1990s.

If you are under 40… a phrase I seem to be using more and more as time goes on… you may not be aware of the struggle to implement caller ID across the nation in the 1990s.

As a service, caller ID had been available to some businesses for decades at that point.  If you called a WATS line, the original toll free or “800” number service, the phone company passed on inbound phone number data on the the theory that the receiver was paying for the call so they were entitled to know who was calling.  Not a lot of companies did anything with that at first… the technology for responding programmatically to CLID and DNIS information at the time was primitive… but there it was.

And many of you probably know that today caller ID is often garbage because it is so easily spoofed… seriously, even Skype lets you set your caller ID number display in its settings, it is that trivial… and is built into your cell phone in any case, so you likely don’t even think of it as its own thing.

But back in the 80s and 90s the phone companies were looking for services to sell, and caller ID was an option.  This was the era when we all had a land line at home, where a pair of copper wires connected your device… from a big clunky Western Electric rotary model to that football shaped phone you got for subscribing to Sports Illustrated… to the rest of the world.

In the US at the time, caller ID was a message that was sent down the line between the first and second ring of your phone.  Don’t answer on the first ring or you won’t get your caller ID… at least on an old style, two wire, land line phone.

The data itself was either just the phone number… single message data format (SMDF)… or the phone number and some identifying text… multiple data message format (MDMF)… that, if you subscribed to the service and had a device able to decode the message… would display that information.

Pretty simple.  This was going to make the phone company money and solve a lot of problems.  If Moe is getting a lot of crank calls, he just has to subscribe to the service and get a caller ID enabled device, and he can find out that it has been Bart Simpson tormenting him all this time.

And in a number of states it was just that simple.  But not California.  Ours was not the only state where it was a struggle, but we seemed to take the longest to get to a resolution.  People didn’t like the idea that others could see their number when they called so demanded the ability to block the broadcast of caller ID.  This caused a counter demand for the ability to block all incoming calls that blocked caller ID, along with how the *69 dial back service would work and probably a few other complications I am forgetting more than 25 years down the road.

The upshot of all of this is that we were developing a product to use a service that wasn’t actually available to us.

Yes, there are ways to simulate caller ID.  I became quite adept at programming the Teltone analog phone line simulator we had in the office we called the lab.  I assembled a bunch of scripts in ZTerm to set it up for various scenarios, something that would be useful at a future date.  But we couldn’t just take a unit home and try it to see how it responded to incoming calls from various services and locations across the country.  We also couldn’t test in live environments locally to see what various ringer equivalence loads would do to the device.  Both of these became issues.

At this point I should probably get to the product itself, the YoYo.

The 1996 YoYo… dirty after years in somebody’s garage

The YoYo was a computer peripheral that hooked up to your computer and your phone line… very much like a modem, because we were all modem people on that bus.  The Macintosh version, which we did first, was also like the old Global Village Teleport in that it hooked up to the Apple Desktop Bus port, which allowed it to be daisy chained with your keyboard, mouse, and whatever other device you happened to have plugged in there, leaving your serial ports free for other use… such as a modem.

YoYo system requirements for Macintosh… look, we even put a modem in the layout

I know why it wouldn’t work on the MacPlus, as it lacked an ADB port.  I cannot recall why the SE and the Classic were excluded, save for the fact that by 1996 those were both pretty old and out of date models.

Once plugged in, the YoYo would allow you to do all sorts of things.

The back of the YoYo box with all the details

You may have to click on that to read the fine print.  Looking at that now, decades down the road, sends me into a reverie of memories about features and how we arrived at some of them, as well as just the general state of phones and contact management.  I personally had Now Contact, from Now Software, that kept all my address and phone information and which would print out mailing labels for Christmas cards and a nice little wallet size phone list for numbers I might need but hadn’t memorized.  It was an era when, even if you had a cell phone, it maybe had a few numbers you could program as a speed dial feature, but was nowhere close to my iPhone today which now serves as my contact manager.

Anyway, the YoYo could take the incoming caller ID and pop up the caller information on your computer screen, play a custom sound for numbers you had setup (before custom ringtones were a thing on your phone!) or even say the names using text to speech, block other numbers from ringing through to your phone, filter calls passing through to your phone based on a time filter, store caller ID on the device when your computer was off, keep an inbound and outbound call log, dial the phone for you from our address book or your contact manager (the YoYo would go off hook and dial, then you could pick up your phone handset and take over), and even page you caller ID information when you were away, also based on filters and also available when your computer was off.

It would also blink its single red/greed LED based on whether it had stored information. (The LED was obnoxiously bright as I recall.)  And, it could also be setup to blink if you had messages on your phone company / Centrex voice mail.

And it was all kind of neat.  It really worked and did what the box said.

We have also entered an era where there is finally web coverage of a product I worked on.  So you can find mentions of the YoYo on the following sites:

The whole thing didn’t really make as many waves as we were hoping for.  While we got some mentions, the reception wasn’t stellar.  I found a reference to MacUser giving us 3 out of 5 mice in their review, not the endorsement we were looking for.

But we were not done yet.  We also rolled out a version for Windows.  Windows 95 was still pretty fresh on the scene and it seemed like being early on that bandwagon might be good.  We hired a dev to do the Windows version for us and… we hired the wrong person.  If you couldn’t do it by default using Microsoft Foundation Class Library, this told us it couldn’t be done.

So that dev was let go and the former GV devs, who had done the Macintosh version, learned how to do the same things in Windows, often from scratch.  And so we had a multi-platform solution.

But there were problems.

On the Windows side of thing, while we wanted to do a USB version of the YoYo, USB wasn’t really a thing yet.  I mean, the spec was there and the motherboard of the Windows PC I bought for home had USB ports on the back.  However, Windows support wasn’t there yet and wouldn’t be for a while.

Because of that, our hardware required a serial port.  People used to scoff at the Mac for having just two serial ports, which seems funny until you start dealing with Windows PCs with just one serial port.

So the problem calls began to roll in and part of my duties were to be tech support.  I handled the email support and three of us rotated coming in at 5am to cover the support phone to be there for the beginning of east coast business hours.

The Windows people called up to tell us they didn’t have a serial port to plug it into because their single port was being used for their mouse.  Ooops.

The Mac people called up because, while they could get theirs plugged into the ADB port, the YoYo wasn’t picking sensing the called ID coming in, usually because they had five phones plugged into jacks in different rooms or they had some ancient Western Electric model phone plugged in or that Sports Illustrated phone was causing some issue, all scenarios that pushed the ringer equivalency past the threshold at which we could detect the incoming call.

We also had a number of calls from places in semi-rural Texas complaining that they would get a call from a friend in Chicago and their caller ID would show up just fine, but when their neighbor called the app claimed there was no caller ID to be had.

For those people we sent out a $5,000 phnoe line analyzer via FedEx overnight, then talked them through how to take and store a reading, then had them send it back to us, only to discover a pattern.  It turns out that Texas, being geographically large, had at the time a bunch of small phone service providers, many of whom couldn’t or wouldn’t configure their 4ESS or DMS-100 phone switch to correctly adhere to the Bellcore spec.

After a few of those we learned the pattern; if somebody says out of town caller ID works but the neighbor doesn’t, it is their phone company they need to speak to.  But nobody is happy to get that answer, and all the more so when there were caller ID devices out there that had already been through that pain and had adjusted their tolerances in order to deal with the rural outliers, so we had people angry that their $10 Radio Shack caller ID device worked with the neighbors and our $150 doo-dad did not.  Also, the local phone company didn’t care.  That is a tough call to get through.

We no doubt would have learned a lot about that sort of thing had we been building the YoYo in a location where caller ID was available from something other than a Teltone line simulator, a device that is, by default, very much on spec.

Meanwhile, a lot of the feedback from our customer base indicated that we had been focusing on the wrong features.

We spent a lot of time on the whole sound and icons aspect of incoming calls.  Our limited ad campaign highlighted the fact that you could tailor sounds to match your incoming caller… in that our ad headline said you could make your mother-in-law sound like a cow or a pig.

This was sufficient to earn us a second place award from a group ranking the most misogynistic tech ads, which was kind of saying something in 1996, where some other contenders below us seemed to be overtly condoning sexual assault and ads objectifying women were a staple of the back page ads of most computer magazines.  I am sure 30-something me thought our ad was funny, given the time I spent with my grandparents growing up where Henny Youngman was considered hilarious and mothers-in-law were ripe targets for comedic barbs.

The ad was neither here nor there when it came to sales, which were slow.  Our most invested customers seemed to be interested in the automatic paging function of the device.  We had done a rudimentary paging feature because the chipset in the YoYo included modem functionality… it was, in fact, another modem product I worked on… which allowed us to dial out and communicate with paging services.

The initial feature would just send a number, but on getting feedback we expanded that to support different options, including the ability to send MDMF information to pagers that supported text data.

In addition, we had a few customers who really like the ability to use the dialer integration to contact manager apps to log calls for business purposes.  We ended up honing that feature as well.

But the audience for the YoYo… seemed to be pretty small.  Our big moment of hope came when we received a huge order from Incredible Universe, the Tandy Corporation… owners of Radio Shack… attempting to get into the big box electronics store business, which was a thing in the 90s.

Then they filed for bankruptcy, which meant not getting paid for their order.  Then, slowly but surely, deliveries of YoYo, returned to us, showing up in dribs and drabs.

The YoYo was not a success.  Like a lot of niche products, it had a small user base that really liked its features, but never found any broad appeal.  There was a special version that was built for US West, one of the regional Bell operating companies that came out of the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s, that had a specific feature set tailored to their needs.  That was after I had been let go, so I never knew much about that deal.

But none of this mattered.  This was but a minor set back.  This was a skirmish in the larger campaign.  We were on our way to launch the killer product for residential ISDN, which was the post-modem future.  Our ISDN product, the Boogie Board, would do all that the YoYo did and more.

Which means that next time I need to get into the complete collapse of residential ISDN as a viable market in the United States, a tale of bad timing, bad training, and corporate greed.

As for my former co-worker mentioned at the outset of this post… he agreed.  We had the talent to do so many things in that era where dotcom money was flowing like water, and we chose to go with the YoYo.

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