Tag Archives: Big Island

The Great Failure of Residential ISDN in the US Market

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Integrated Services Digital Network, or ISDN, was going to be the next step, the incremental movement beyond modems.

Because incremental was the norm.  We were used to that.  We had a whole industry that went from 300bps and 1200bps hardware to 2400bps then to 9600bps then to 14,400bps then to 28,800bps then to 33,600bps, finally capping at 56,000bps some 20 years down the road.

And modems were capped at 56Kbps due to the bandwidth of phone lines in the US.  And even hitting that speed was a bit of a pipe dream.  Modems commonly negotiated down to a lower speed based on line conditions once 28.8Kbps became the standard.  The firmware on a typical 56Kbps modem was configured to return CONNECT 56000 on any v.34 connection, regardless of the speed it actually settled on… and unless you had no problems in your home wiring and were connecting to an ISP on the same phone switch in the same central office, that speed was not going to be 56K.

If you worked on modems you knew that was the truth, that what you could do in the lab on a line simulator could be miles from what was going on in the real world.

But ISDN was going to solve all of that.  ISDN was all digital… that “D” is for digital, just like I said in the first sentence of this post… and so if it said it was going to deliver a 64Kbps connection, you got a 64Kbps connection.  And, you didn’t have to settle for that incremental upgrade… it is hard to sell going from 56Kbps to 64Kbps even if you know that the 56Kbps value is a lie and not at all comparable to the low latency, solid 64Kbps connection that ISDN could deliver… because with each residential ISDN line you got TWO 64Kbps connections, called B channels, for bearer channels, which could be paired up for 128Kbps AND you got another 16Kbps D channel for signalling and other side data needs.

And if a call came in, ISDN would tear down one of the B channels, pass through your voice call, and you could continue on doing whatever online at 64Kbps while talking, then when the call was over you could get back to full speed.

The promise of all of that, plus the D channel, which could potentially pop up news or sports scores or whatever… it was a 16Kbps secondary channel… opened up a fantasy world of possibilities.

Then the phone companies got involved and fucked the whole thing up.

Okay, the fantasies were a bit grandiose at times and today, where I have a 400Mbps line pinned up in my home 24/7 for always online internet (Are you old enough to remember when people used to brag about their company having a T1 line for data, which was 1.544Mbps?) the idea of even a 128Kbps connection seems piddling.  At the right moment in history though, that speed would have been something.

If the phone companies could have gotten on board with large scale residential ISDN around, say, 1990… or even 1993… it would have been a boon for the end users and would have sunk the modem market early.

The truth is though, while there were pockets of experimental deployments, the demand wasn’t there and the phone company wasn’t interested in investing without that… and when the demand was there… well, the phone company got greedy.

When we were facing the great dial tone drought in Silicon Valley in the mid-90s, the phone companies were suddenly regretting the whole flat rate dialing plan idea that they had come up with in the late 60s.  That plan was great when phone calls rarely lasted more than a few minutes and their infrastructure didn’t need to be scaled up even as they were hooking up more residential phone lines.  It was a reliable, predictable revenue stream that made both them and the customer happy.

And then the internet showed up and a bunch of people started staying online all evening or even all night, reading email, checking for email, downloading stuff, checking for email again, looking at porn, checking for email once more just in case, playing a video game or two, and arguing with people on Usenet… and the infrastructure wasn’t up to the task and the customers were not happy and the government boards that oversaw the phone company’s happy local monopoly started asking awkward questions, and soon then had to actually open up their pocketbook and start upgrading the network they had been largely neglecting since the break up of AT&T.

So the phone companies swore they wouldn’t get suckered again with a flat rate dialing plan for any new service, and the next new service on the agenda was ISDN.  That was going to be a metered connection, pay by the minute, make those internet addicts pay pricing plan.

Flat rate, all you can eat at 56Kbps… even if that ends up being 24Kbps for a lot of people… suddenly looks very attractive when compared to 128Kbps when the phone company is looking to bill you in six second increments or some such.

This played out differently in different markets, and I can only speak to how PacBell operated, but the net result was that demand for residential ISDN was suppressed.

Here in the domain of PacBell the Public Utility Commission viewed the whole metered connection thing as the cash grab it was and reigned in PacBell, making them offer a some of the connection time at a flat rate, but allowing them to have a data cap, after which they could charge more.

PacBell had to go along, but they did so by embracing ISDN installation the way one might embrace a week old halibut found laying on the street on a hot summer day.

You could get an analog phone line installed the same week, but if you called up and asked about ISDN you might get no answer at all because they weren’t sure where it was available or who might install it.  When you could get an appointment, staff were untrained and admitted as much… they were not happy to have been assigned a task they hadn’t been trained for… so your chances of getting a live line on the first try was dubious.

I happened to get lucky.  When the installer came out for my appointment he had already done a couple and knew what to do.  This made me an outlier at the office where tales of failure were the norm and it took two or three tries for some people before they had a working line.

At my place the junction box was close by and even though the installer wasn’t sure what the SPID was for my connection… that process was not yet codified or some such… I had on me a patented… seriously, PATENTED… document of instructions on how to calculate the SPID based on a set of known parameters and standard behaviors of various phone companies, which turned out to work.  So I was up and running on ISDN on the first try.  I had a Motorola terminal adapter… it isn’t a modem because there is no modulation by default, at least until you attach an analog phone to it… because the Boogie Board was still a work in progress.  But we wanted to have knowledge of the process of getting residential ISDN set up.  We had been through the whole caller ID thing without caller ID being available and were still smarting a bit from that.

It was a unit like this… maybe the Bitsurfer… it was a long time ago

And the hardware was another thing.  Unlike a modem, which you can go buy at the store and setup immediately with your phone line, the ISDN terminal adapter is of zero value until you have your ISDN line wired up and configured correctly.  And, thus, ISDN was also not an impulse purchase, and I cannot emphasize how much of tech progress is driven by impulse purchases by males with more hope than sense.

But when it all came together, it was sweet.  In the age of modems, ISDN was head and shoulders above analog dial-up.  My ISP wanted to charge me extra for 128Kbps connections, but let me ride at the same price as normal dial-up for a single channel 64Kbps connection, so I lived with that.  Playing early online games like Delta Force or Starsiege: Tribes on even that single 64Kbps line gave me a serious advantage.  Playing Diablo II online with friends I could see their locations getting updated more slowly compare to my own.  And when EverQuest came out, oh man.  I used to zone so much faster than other people.

It came at a price though.  When the tech wired up my ISDN connection, he punched down my pair of wires at the far end of the box, by themselves, to indicate that they were a different service.

However, that did not translate to other techs showing up.  They would show up, see a pair of wires hanging out by themselves at the far end of the junction box and think, “Cool, an unused connection already setup for me.  I’ll just wire up this order I have with those and be done in record time.”

Then I would get home from work and the ISDN would be down and I would have to call PacBell who would get to it in a few days.  It used to be that I would be driving home and I would see a PacBell service truck on our street or driving away as I pulled up and I would know that the ISDN would be down… and I was right every single time.  And about half the time the tech who came out for my service call wouldn’t know what the hell was wrong or what ISDN was, so unless I stayed home for the service call there was a good chance I would have to call back again and complain that they didn’t fix the problem.

When it was up, it was sweet.  When it was down… well, a down line is of no use at all.

And I know that this is my own experience in the SF Bay Area in the back half of the 1990s… though you might be excused for believing somehow that Silicon Valley would be on top of this stuff, being the tech capital of whatever.  Other places in the US fare differently, and I know that in Europe there were countries with very high adoption rates.

The problem in the US was that once the phone companies started to get their act together on the whole ISDN thing… other technologies were already becoming available.  Sure, I zoned fast in EverQuest, but not as fast as a guy we used to group with who had this thing he called a “cable modem” from his local cable TV provider.  My first brush with what we now think of as broadband.

Which brings us to Big Island and our ISDN ambitions.  We were some keen early adopters… relatively speaking for the area… of the technology, but even as we were getting our first product out the door, the YoYo I wrote about previously, PacBell was announcing ADSL, a flat rate, always on digital data connection that could be run on the same wires… simultaneously… as your analog phone line.

I seem to recall the PacBell announcement was the same day as the YoYo launch press release, but I could be wrong on that.  It coincided with some event at Big Island and it was a turd in the punch bowl of our dreams.

I kept my ISDN line for quite some time, until my wife and I bought our first house.  The new place was too far from the local junction box to run either ISDN or ADSL and I had to return to analog modem dial-up.  And if the copper pair is too far to run those digital services, then there is no way in hell I was going to ever get anything close to a 56Kbps connection.  It would be a while and a couple of tries before something like real broadband was a thing for us.

Big Island’s ISDN card, the Boogie Board, and all the wonderful things it was going to be able to do… as I said, everything the YoYo did on steroids along with a lot more… fell by the wayside.  The VCs who had been financing the company cut way back.  They shifted some of our tech… which they owned… to another startup they were funding.  We were not selling enough YoYos to pay anybody, so if we couldn’t hold out and work for free we were going to be looking for another job.

And, our there somewhere, somebody was annoyed enough by the collapse of the company to write to the US copyright office to ask that commercial software source code be put in escrow so that when a company goes away there will be some way to get the software updated.  I am kind of with him on the Claris Emailer front, which happened to be the software package I used to do all of the email support for Big Island.

Putting software in escrow… that is an enterprise software thing, and we’re not there yet.  Before we get there I had to go find another job.

The Telephone tales so far:

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.

The series so far:

From the Village to the Island

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We’ve reached the point of my mild discontent with Global Village.

It is 1995 and the company is at about the point of peak success.  We had gone public.  Our stock, having sagged early on, had rebounded and climbed above the IPO price.  We had the Apple Powerbook market in our pocket, we had made the wise decision to make the hardware for our 28.8K modem, the Teleport Platinum, as cheap as possible, making it a strong competitor in the Mac market, and we had a great relationship with the Performa team over Apple and continued to make special models for them.  Everything looked like a success.

But there was clearly something wrong.

It wasn’t the people I worked with.  I liked all of them and went on to work with some of them again down the road.  We all seemed to get along and even socialized outside of work.  This was a prime era for playing Marathon or Bolo on the company network after hours.

Management, however, didn’t seem to know what to do and even I, as oblivious as I could be 30 years back, could sense the distinct lack of anything like a real plan for the future of the company.  Sure, we could make more modems.  But the spec was out and plans were already under way for a 56Kbps modem, after which we will would hit the cap on modem speeds.

I have mentioned all of the other potential projects in a previous post, but I was sitting there in the room and could see them all either failing to gain traction in the market or failing to ship.  Plans for an ISDN product were being rejected and re-worked on a regular cycle.

It was an era of continuing to do what we already knew how to do without anything approaching innovation.  The key founders, Len, Rick, and Lori, had all been pushed out of the company by that point, and the new leadership… were not bad people.   But I wasn’t at all inspired by them.  And the company had grown and we had hired or promoted a bunch of people who were not there in the lean pre-startup era and who clearly set to work at a more leisurely pace.

A manager for one group sat in his office for his first six months planning his wedding.  He was on the phone constantly about one thing or another. (His inattention to his team was highlighted when confidential AppleLink messages were somehow including in the Read Me file on the product disk.)

My own supervisor, when he wasn’t trying to slip out of the office early, would close the door to his office and listen to music or play his guitar. (He confided this to a co-worker later, and it was all he could do to not shout, “Well duh!  We all knew that!”)

Then I would have to go to a project meeting with him and he would display a complete lack of knowledge as to what was going on, then would be annoyed with me for amending half of his statements in an attempt to maintain some level of coherence with what was actually going on.  He also had a habit of finding some issue and then bringing it up at every product meeting, but never having anything more to say than he saw something happen weeks back that looked like a bug without being able to pin it down to a build and without any follow up on his part ever.

It was frustrating and I was young and rash and prone to pointing out such things in the middle of these meetings.  I believe I earned the eternal enmity of one of the product managers when he showed up to one of the project meetings with a project schedule for the new premium modem we were working on and I started loudly pointing out problems (things like the date to ship beta units to customers came two weeks before we would have the beta boards and six weeks before we would have cases to put those boards in) in front of his boss.

A few years later I applied for a job and his wife was the hiring manager.  I did not get that job and was told, directly by her, that they wanted somebody who would be a “team player.”  Touche!

We’ll get to that.

Nothing was at all inspiring save for whatever I was working on at the moment.  I enjoyed my actual job, but the environment was one of malaise.  I can very much reflect the people I work with, and if a lot of them are just mailing it in, then I tend to slack as well.

So I was working on yet another modem for the Apple Performa line, the Teleport Platinum V, which was for “voice” and not “five,” which was a modem card with support for voice features, which were stating to be a thing.  A company called Cypress Research had software package called MegaPhone that let you make calls through your modem and would allow it to act as an answering machine and all sorts of other little things.

MegaPhone for Performa

They were making a special version for the Apple Performa models and we were building up the hardware and, as projects went, it was about the smoothest I was ever on.  We shipped all the features for Apple on time and within budget.  I think this may be the only time in my career that a project with any complexity at all… we weren’t doing anything drastically new, but there were a lot of balls in the air and Apple had a hard deadline… hit all of its marks without having to cut a feature or slip a date.

The only hitch was that Apple ran out of developer units of the actual computer before the team at Cypress got one.  But I had a couple spares because I knew the guy who handled the dev unit distribution (he worked at GV before he went to Apple), so I got one setup with the modem and drove it over to their office so they could do their own testing with the final hardware.  Or maybe they drove over to our office.  All I recall is that they were happy and relieved that I had been there for them.

This will also come into play in a later post.

That shipped, I got a pat on the back and my boss got a bonus, because that is how things work and I was just that much less motivated to do anything for GV.

Enter Rick… again.

Rick was one of the founders of Global Village and they key driving force that made it a success.  As noted above, he was pushed out of the company once it went public.  He had done his job.  He had inspired a host of very smart people and laid all the groundwork for what Global Village was at its peak.  He was also somebody whose passion and intellect inspired those who worked for him.

I could go on… I’ve written and deleted a few paragraphs here that felt like not enough to describe him… but I will say that he was the type of leader who gets the best out of people and we were all pretty devoted to him.  He didn’t have much room for slackers and would not put up with poor efforts, but he was always there to help you to be better and do better.

It is hard to describe what it is like to work at a small company with somebody who is actually inspiring, who is fun to work with, who has smart ideas and who recognizes when you have a good idea but won’t let it rest until you have refined it into the best thing it can be.

Working at GV after Rick was somewhat empty.  The new leadership could tell they couldn’t match him in person, so they tried to be fun.  The engineering team all got flown to Disneyland for the day after a big release.  That was cool.  We had a good time.  But that was writing a check, not leadership.  We got T-shirts for projects and little tokens.  I still have in a drawer a watch with the GV logo on its face (technically, not the watch they gave me as I broke that one, but a co-worker gave me his and I still have that one) and a gold plated key chain they gave out for the 5th anniversary of the founding of the company.

Global Village trinkets

My wife wonders why I have all this stuff stashed away.  I don’t know.  These were in there with the Jostens walnut pen and letter opener desk set that I received on my 5th anniversary at Safeway.  I’ve had that in its original box since 1988.

Anyway, in addition to trying to buy a bit of loyalty, they also denigrated Rick now and then, pointed out how they were doing so well and were the ones who really grew the company in that way that people who inherit the success of others do in an attempt to make that success their own.  Not exactly The Founder, if only because nobody on the executive staff was up to Ray Kroc’s level, but they would have gone that far could they have managed it… or had built even one success independent of the original team.

So when Rick called me one day to invite me out to lunch, I was happy to go.  I figured it would be some talk about old times and a chance to hear how he and his family were doing now that he had achieved Silicon Valley startup success.

But at lunch Rick said he wanted to do it again.  He wanted to do another startup.  He had some ideas, he had VC backers because he had already delivered for them once, and he wanted to assemble a team to come work at the new company.

He specifically said, an I remember this distinctly, that he had kept everything so lean at GV… part of what it survive on the initial ADB Teleport modem until the PowerBook opportunity appeared… that he felt he hadn’t been able to handle success when it came, that GV should have done better, could have done better if he had known then what he had learned since.

Modems were done.  We all knew that.  But he was going to be ready for the next phase.  ISDN was going to be the coming thing.  The next company was going to be Big Island Communications, because that was where we would retire after it went public, and we were going to make ISDN as seamless and easy as we had with fax and modem at Global Village.  He even had a name for the product, the Boogie Board, in keeping with the island theme.

Yes, Boogie Board is a trademark for the a wave board created by Tom Morey, and we would have been in trouble had we been making something that was anywhere close to that product area.  But an electronic device that has nothing to do with ocean waves… it can be done.  In fact, somebody went at did it about a decade later.  I mean, had we achieved huge success his company might have had its lawyers calling us, but that never really became an issue.

Rick also said that his departing agreement with GV said that he couldn’t come back and overtly poach talent for any new venture, but he was talking to a few people about his plan, people he wanted to bring on board when things were ready.  I was excited for this new prospect and feeling a bit surprised that I somehow made the list.

He didn’t want me to go telling people about this plan and he wanted to keep his list quiet, so he wasn’t going to tell me who else he was talking to, but if I paid attention to who wore Hawaiian shirts on Friday at the office, I might get some sort of hint.

I, naturally, began wearing a Hawaiian print polo shirt to the office every Friday thereafter, a habit I continue to this day… though, frankly, if you’ve worked with me at all in the last decade or so, you might note that I wear a Hawaiian print polo shirt almost every day.  But it became a thing for me back then.

Word, of course, leaked and the VP of engineering made veiled references in one meeting to people being lured away to some fantasy startup and how we’d be smart to stay with a successful company… looking straight at me while I was wearing my Hawaiian print polo shirt.

If you know anything about residential ISDN in the United States, then you probably know this story doesn’t end with us all retiring to the big island of Hawaii.  There were a number of factors that killed residential ISDN, and I’ll get into that.

But Rick wasn’t going to jump us straight into ISDN as the first product.  We would be working on that, and the software we would be developing would dove tail into that plan eventually.  He wanted an initial success, something not too expensive or complex, something that would appeal to users, and something he could use his legendary guerilla marketing techniques to get off the ground.  He needed a small but tangible win to get the funding to really go to town on the full ISDN plan.

So in 1996, when I put in my notice at Global Village having worked there for what seemed like forever at the time, but which was barely three and a half years all told, I wouldn’t be working on the Boogie Board.  No, I would be working on the YoYo.

Yo-yos used to market the YoYo

That leads me to the next chapter of my career.  Modems… analog modems of the old school form… seemed like they were in my rear view mirror.  I would be moving on, on to Caller ID.

The series so far: