Tag Archives: Global Village

Stock Options and the IPO

I have been saving this post for this day because it is a special day, the anniversary of my experiencing the Silicon Valley dream; the IPO! Been there, done that, and literally got the T-shirt. What else can I say? Well, a lot of things it seems.

My wife ironed it a bit

30 years ago today Global Village went public and was availble for trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the GVIL ticker.

Everybody who worked at Global Village on that day got one of those T-shirts. Mine has been sitting in a frame for more than 20 years now. It used to be on the wall in my office at work, back when I was important enough to warrant an office, and it has sat in my home office since then.

Stock options and going public are the things that Silicon Valley dreams are made of… though being bought out by Google used to come pretty close on that front. There are legendary tales of invididuals who got in early, worked hard with the promise of their stock options being worth something some day, and who were able to retire when the magic moment hit. (And equally legendary tales of people who gave up their shares only to later find that they have abandoned riches.)

There is a long standing story of old hands at Microsoft with stickers on their badge reading “FYIFV,” which stood for “fuck you, I’m fully vested” meaning that they could take the money and run any time they pleased.

I know people who have hung around Apple for ages who are worth millions due to stock options they were given over the years, especially options handed out at very low valuations during the bad days between Scully and the return of Steve Jobs.

My story is perhaps less dramatic. It is certainlty less lucrative.

When I started in tech support at Global Village in 1992 I made $28K annually, was given 2,500 options valued at 25 cents each, that being the estimated value of shares when I was hired, and the choice of a better computer if I opted to sit in an interior cube versus a window cube.

And you only need to look out the window if your computer is slow, right?

As with most people, my stock options vested over time. For some reason they decided to set the vesting period for five years, so after working there a year 500 shares would be available for me to purchase at the initial valuation. I would then accrue more shares on a monthly basis until I hit five years, at which point I would be fully vested.

Most places considered four years enough, but somebody at GV got five years in the head. Later, when I moved on to Big Island I complained to Rick that I was going to have to leave behind more than 500 shares of stock because I wouldn’t be fully vested until mid-1997. The stock still had value then. By 1997 it has lost much of it.

As I worked my way out of support and upstairs into engineering, the company was harnessing its success and building towards going public. One of the things that happened was the VCs started putting people in place to run the company, people who would follow their instructions for preparing the company for an IPO.

Our CEOI was one of the marketing executives from Apple who were on the PowerBook project, and the CFO… I forget where he was from, though I recall he later left in disgrace due to some ethical lapse.

But that wouldn’t make him alone in the board room I guess.

We needed two things to go public back then. The first was that we had to have two successful product lines. We already had the Macintosh modem market sewn up pretty well. But modems were all viewed as a single product line. That was where the OneWorld network fax, modem, remote access server line came in.

The Global Village OneWorld

It didn’t have to be super successful, it just had to prove that we had two product lines.

Then we had to show a continuous pattern of growth. This meant that every quarter had to exceed the past quarter for revenue. That mean cutting off some quarters early when we had made enough revenue in order to carry it forward into the next.

This was, of course, unethical and probably unlawful. But our CEO told us they were doing it at a company meeting, so it isn’t like they were hiding it.

And, of course, we had to be profitable. But that was no problem. The Mac modem market was lucrative, the PowerBook segment especially.

This all changed not too far down the line. The rules changed when the VCs decided they wanted to cash out on Netscape about a year and a half later. Netscape didn’t need to make money or have a long term plan, they went public on hype and a pomise that there must be SOMETHING of value in the company because we were all using the Netscape Natigator browser… you were supposed to pay for it, but almost nobody did… and a company that had something on damn near everybody’s computer had to be wise and powerful.

It set the pattern for the dotcom boom, the idea that you just had to have a lot of users, that butts in seats, as it was called, was more important that making a profit or having a business plan that made any sense.

I happened to live at an apartment at Whisman and Middlefield Road, at one end of the series of buildings that would soon have the Netscape name on them. They, somewhat ironically, even had the old Cisco Systems building on Middlefield, a company that was the target model for many startups in the 90s.

As sure as Marc Andreesen provided the spark that made Netscape possible, he also provided most of the very dumb ideas that kept it from being anything beyond a brief flash in the pan. If Steve Case, head of AOL, hadn’t been a sucker, hadn’t believed the hype, he might have saved himself the effort of dismantling the failure that was Netscape rather than buying it in 1998. Instead he bailed out Andreesen and made him even richer. Case was smart enough to only buy Netscape with AOL stock, and he managed to turn around and sell AOL to Time Warner in 2000, so he wasn’t a complete chump.

Anyway, if you see me dismissing Marc Andreesen as somebody who was simply in the right place at the right time, I submit as evidence pretty much everything he has done since the Netscape IPO… and doubly so that he and his current firm are all in on crypto, though they clearly want to be the scammer in that equation, the rent seeking landlord, the house that wins no matter what happens.

But I digress.

So the day came, February 24, 1994, and Global Village went public. GVIL was listed on NASDAQ. I think the CEO got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street that day. We were all going to be rich!

Right? RIGHT?

Well, no. Or maybe. I certainly was not.

The stock opened up at $8 a share. If I had been able to exercise and sell ALL my shares on that date, it would have been worth $20,000. That wasn’t going to buy me a house, much less let me retire, even in 1994. But it could have been a down payment on a nice condo.

Except, of couse, I couldn’t sell all of my shares on that day. I had only hit about a year and a half of vesting, so I only had some shares available. 791 I think.

But still, if I could sell those, it would still net me more than $6K after fees and such.

I could not, however, sell ANY shares because when a company does an IPO employee shares are generally locked out from being sold for a period of time in order to let the VCs and other favored investors cash out in the initial frenzy. We had to wait six months.

And in six months, after the big cash out, the stock was down to $5 a share. That was even less interesting than $8 a share. But our time was not done yet.

The inetrnet was becoming a thing. While I disdained Netscape just a few paragraphs back, a company with no plan and no proven track record that went public on hype alone, the hype was not reserved for Netscape alone.

The market itself was rising. We were past the post Cold War recession, the peace dividend was a thing, Bill Clinton was president, and the internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular were suddenly the most interesting thing for Wall Street. We all wanted to get online, to the point that I wrote about the great dial tone drought a while back. Netscape was a symptom, not a cause of the hype, and any company that was involved with getting online was suddenly viewed with a great fondness beyond anything Lord British ever felt. (If anybody gets that call back reference I will be amazed.)

Among the beneficiaries was GVIL, which was pulled out of its $5 doldrums and began to rise with the internet tide. It passed $8, then $12, then $16 a share. Maybe we would be rich!

The price peaked just past $21 a share at one point. I remember this vividly as I had my shares with a broker and the day it hit that I put in a sell order. I could have sold at market, which would have just gotten me the money. That was in early 96 I think, which would have given me nearly 2,000 shares to play with. That many shares at $20… well, again, I wasn’t going to be rich, but that was a down payment on a real house or maybe a new car paid for in cash, with money set aside for the taxes on the sale.

But I did not put in the sell order at market price. I put it in at $22 a share to eke out just a little bit more cash. And it never got there. I then chased the price down the drain for the next two years. I would set a sell order at a price… because it wasn’t in constant decline, it would bounce back up a bit, before settling down to a lower plateau than before… hoping to catch an uptick, only to have the price drop, never to return.

It fell through $18, $12, $10, $8, $5 and was mucking about around $4 a share, at which point I was hardly paying attention. The modem market had collapsed… modems were becoming a commodity and Apple was at its nadir, that period when it was bouncing around between $12 and $18 a share, when Michael Dell was quipping about the company just giving them investors their money back and calling it a day… and Global Village sold off its modem business and its name.

San Jose Mercury News – April 1, 1998

By that point Big Island was in its own spiral and I was a Cypress Research and had an offer from a company called Edify, that would change my path into enterprise software.

The company became One World, and its stock ticker changed to OWLD. Lots of grandious promises were made and hamfisted attempts to create a pump and dump scam out of the stock were rife in the Yahoo finance forum for the stock.

I sold most of my stock before it turned to OWLD at somewhere around $3 a share. I went from a new BMW to a new PC in value. And I didn’t even sell all of it. Before the pre-IPO I had exercised my first vesting of shares. I have a stock certificate for 500 shares of Global Village in a drawer with my name on them.

Exercising shares before the IPO was a dumb thing to do, and I blame my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm for this lapse. When you buy shares like that, before the IPO, they become directly registered shares. You may have heard reference to directly registered shares as part of the dumbassery around the GameStop stock bubble, where the amateur investors, the “apes,” built up a whole fantasy around direct restistered shares. (If you haven’t heard about that, Folding Ideas has an excellent video about the whole thing. Worth watching, or at least listening to.)

The reality is that such shares are just a pain in the ass to sell because you have to do transactions through physical mail, with all the delay that incurs, to do anything with them. By the time I wanted to do something with them, the stock was already sinking.

Meanwhile, the company stayed in steady decline. OWLD would fall below $1 a share, with delisting threatened, before the company folded up shop in 1999.

It could have been worse. The story was one of the early hires held onto their 25,000 shares until the place went out of business. They believed in the company, and emotional investment in something like a tech company is never a good idea.

But I did learn my lesson. When I took my vested Edify options… a merger caused them all to vest early, which changed the ticker to SONE, a company we’ll get to later… and sold them because my wife and I wanted to buy a house. I set a sell order at market value and cashed them all out at $130 a share. The stock closed over $131, and touched close to $134 before the bell that day, at what was the absolute peak of the dotcom boom. It was literally the bubble just before it burst. I was a bit disappointed that I had sold below the days high and wondered if I had called in too early, if the next day would see the market climb even higher.

It did not. The next day the stock fell to $128. And it fell a bit more the day after that, and more every day for many days to come. I had the good fortune and amazing luck to have sold at just a couple of bucks below its ultimate peak price point. We bought the house and, as it turns out, buying real estate in Silicon Valley in 2000 had a better return than most investments.

Nobody has ever offered me stock options again. It stopped being as much of a thing after the dotcom bubble. Taxes and accounting laws were tightened up and the executives decided that only they deserved stock options for all of their hard work.

I closed my brokerage accounts and have not since invested directly in any stock, avoiding anything like the stock purchase plans that some companies have offered now and then, where twice a year they buy stock for you with money they have held back from your paycheck at the market price less a discount for being in the program… usually 15%.

And at every buy date the stock in question would spike up, much more than the 15% discount, and then fall back the next day, ensuring that the whole thing was a screw job for those who bought in on it.

I have money in a 401k for retirement, in an index fund. But investing in stock as an individual retail customer with an eye towards increasing your money… that is just gambling. And, as with any form of gambling, the house wins and the individuals lose. The index fund is only allowed to “win” because somebody on Wall Street earns their bonus based on that. You’re allowed to win a bit while they win big… though somehow they win big even when you lose.

I’d like to say it wasn’t always like that. But then I think about the 1920s and the great depression that the market caused while people like Joe Kennedy got rich. Even in the calm periods, where the market seemed focused on dividends and stability, the house always won in the end.

The story so far:

From the Village to the Island

Anecdotes from The Village

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In writing about Global Village Communication over the last few of these posts I was reminded of a few stories that didn’t quite fit into the other narratives, so I figured I would collect a few of them here before I move on to the next stop in my telephony career.

The Two Logos

A lot of thought went into the original Global Village name and logo. Rick, our key founder, talked about spending a couple of months on just that, having made the the mistake of taking name and logo too lightly with his previous company. He had delivered a FORTRAN compiler with a company he had named Palo Alto Shipping. That is another name that failed to make the transition to Google search.

However, when the VCs brought in a new executive team to bring the company public, they didn’t like the old logo and had it redone with more simple shapes and brighter colors.

Old logo vs. New logo

Those are from my old business cards, which I still had in a drawer. They also ditched the sans-serif font and changed the orientation of the business cards… the originals were vertical… and generally made everything “more normal.” Those of us who had been around for a while referred to the new logo as the “Kid Pix logo” as it looked like something made with that youth oriented graphics tool. It was also a jab technical shallowness of our new corporate leadership, who were very much about the trappings of success and not much about the actual mechanics of it.

The Domain Name

In 1993 Global Village first got itself connected up to the internet. The initial connection for the growing company was a 56K leased line, which served all of us. The thing was, the internet service provider/registrar we went with could only support domain names up to 12 letters in length and, if you count on your fingers and the toes of one foot you will see that Global Village has 13 letters in it.

Ah, but the company name was Global Village Communication! Why not just go with “gvc.com” for a domain?

The problem was that, at the time, there was a Taiwanese company operating under the name GVC that also made modems, and they had grabbed the domain.

A GVC Super Modem!

That company was also always confused with us because many people would refer to us by our initials and… well, there was that other company. I don’t know what happened to them, but you can find their old modems on eBay the way you can find Global Village’s.

Anyway, the decision was made, our domain was to be “globalvillag.com” and it remained that way for about two years.

A clip from one of my 1994 business cards

This, of course, was both annoying and mildly embarrassing. At some point in 1995 we ended up changing our internet connection and, along the way, were able to obtain the domain “globalvillage.com” as part of that.

The press release that went out with this had the headline “Global Village Buys a Vowel.”

Always Test or Something

Rockwell, the manufacturer who made the chipset we used in the PowerPort Bronze, updated that chipset and told all of its customers that after a certain batch we would be getting this revised chipset. It was pin compatible and had no changed to its functionality. They likely had just fixed a couple of firmware bugs or cost reduced the design somehow. This happens all the time, so it was no big deal.

So when QA heard about this and asked for a unit with the updated chipset to smoke test before we started shipping them, then then VP of engineering rather sarcastically told us there was no need, it was all pin compatible and please stay in our lane.

One thing that did change was the checksum that the chipset returned when queried, and that was kind of important.

Our software used the checksum to determine which modem was installed in the PowerBook. This was also our low effort copy protection scheme. Since the main value of our product was viewed as the software… we were often asked to license our fax software as it was extremely fast and easy to used compared to the competition… this copy protection was viewed as somewhat important, largely because there were only two major modem chipset manufacturers in the market, Rockwell and AT&T, and we used both, so our software absolutely would work on all of our competitors hardware.

So when the new chipset hit our production line and started appearing in the field, tech support started getting a lot of calls about our software not recognizing their brand new PowerPort Bronze modem in their new PowerBook laptop. Tech support went to QA, which didn’t have the new modem so couldn’t figure out the problem. QA went to the software dev team, which also didn’t have a new modem and gave QA and support the usual “works for me” response.

Eventually one the hardware team passed by and heard us, asked a couple of questions, then brought up the new chipset thing and produced one of the new build modems. Once installed the problem was verified and obvious; the software didn’t recognize the checksum and so rejected the modem.

A version of the software that worked with the new checksum was rolled up in a few minutes, but how to get it out to people who needed it. This event predated the world wide web. The preferred method of software distribution at this point was floppy disk.

So floppies were made and mailed to customers. Very angry customers… who all seemed to be in the 212 area code… got a disk sent overnight via FedEx. Local customers were told they could drop by the office for a floppy. That hit the immediate need, but there were now hundreds of PowerPort Bronze boxes in the sales channel with the wrong software. So there was a scramble to find and get an updated floppy to Apple authorized retailers, which is where most of the installs were happening.

It was one of those things where for months and months afterwards support would get a call because somebody bought one of those modems and the software wouldn’t work. Tech support knew the issue at least, and there was a process, but it added overhead to every PowerPort Bronze sale.

Afterwards, every time hardware said something didn’t need to be tested… and they were pretty shy about saying that for a long time… they were reminded of the H mod PowerPort Bronze modems and all the trouble that caused.

I have used this as one of my tales for new people in QA and development. If you think you need to check something, insist on being allowed to do so.

The Devil is in The Details

The flip side of the above story. One of the… shall we say, less technically adept individuals in tech support… came up to QA with a problem. A customer had called up complaining that they couldn’t fax from QuarkXPress (QX).

They came up to QA to ask us to figure it out and, fortunately for me, they went to Terry, two cubes over, so it wasn’t directly my problem, though we all worked together to figure this out.

The first question was whether one could reasonably expect to fax from QX. It was a PostScript focused design application and faxing was strictly a QuickDraw experience… the difference between printing to a PostScript enabled laser printer and printing to an old dot matrix printer. The former prints and scales based on the formulae of your output while the latter just prints dot for dot whatever is on the page or screen.

That had go back to the customer and they responded that QX did in fact have a QuickDraw print option that one could print things out for samples or prototypes.

That confirmed, next up was getting our hands on a copy of QX in order to try it ourselves. This was difficult because the founders of Quark, Inc were extremely paranoid about copy protection and people stealing their very expensive software. Quark was the sort of place where the floppies were removed from everybody’s Mac to ensure nobody was stealing software.

After quite a bit of work a demo copy was obtained from Quark with a limited duration license that could only be installed on one machine. Terry setup it up, loaded up a sample document, and it faxed out just fine.

We reported that back to support, the person there having been asking us for updates in a very testy fashion for weeks, and they went back to the customer. The customer sent their document, which was tried, and it faxed just fine. So we went through the routine of making sure all the versions lined up and we were using the same modem and the same MacOS patches and whatever. It still worked.

Terry went back to support and asked them to go through the steps, but the support person was adamant, the customer was just faxing and it was throwing an error. That was all they kept saying through the whole process.

So we got on a call directly with the customer and had them walk us through the problem. They opened their document, held down the control key to fax rather than print, selected fax, entered a page range… and there we said, “What? Page range?” Nobody had mentioned that to us.

We asked if they had mentioned that to the support person. They said they had every time. We went to the support person and asked if selecting a page range was something they had heard previously. They said something along the lines of, “Oh yeah, they select a page range every time. But that wasn’t important. The failure to fax was important.”

Except, of course, the page range selection was the critical bit of information we had not been given, literally for months at this point.

QX, being a high end, sophisticated design tool, did not use the standard MacOS print dialog. It had its own special print dialog with many more options and, among other things, it remapped many of the field to meet the needs of the product. The page range entered into that dialog was being delivered to us with a lot of extra data that we did not expect, so we sent an error back to the app which just reported it as a printer error. It was “PC Load Letter” in its own special way.

So we came back and said, “Don’t enter a page range and it will work fine” and the customer said, “That works, but why didn’t you tell me this five months ago?” and it was very hard not to just throw the tech support person under the bus.

A couple of years later we ran into a similar issue when Word 6.0 came out and they too remapped the default print dialog to allow people to print “sections” of a document, a new concept they invented, which of course broke us as well. Page ranges still work though, and support wasn’t happy when we told them people couldn’t fax with the new feature, but at least it didn’t take us five months to figure it out because we had learned not to trust support to provide relevant details.

Ouagadougou

I had the word “Ouagadougou” written on the whiteboard in my cube at one point. It is the name of the capital of Burkina Faso. I had it written there mostly as a goof, an interesting name with a lot of vowels.

Our new CEO, Neil, walked by my cube one day… a rare moment to see him over in engineering… and he saw the word and said, “Ouagadougou is the capital of Upper Volta!” with an obvious amount of pride. I, being young and ready to initiate career limiting moves on a whim, immediately corrected him and said it was the capital of Burkina Faso.

He persisted, stating firmly that it was the capital of Upper Volta because he had a big world map on his wall at home so he knew. Once again, apparently keen to lecture somebody who could fire me, said that Upper Volta had changed its name to Burkina Faso nearly a decade back and that he should see to getting an updated map.

He was not having it. The map said Upper Volta and it was a National Geographic map or some such, so it wasn’t likely to be incorrect.

Finally having sensed I might have ventured into perilous waters, I suggested we look this up later as we both had things to do. This was surprisingly mature of me in hindsight, because I am annoyingly persistent when absolutely sure I am correct on a point of fact. If I am not hedging with something like “I think…” I am going to stand my ground.

We went our separate ways and, a couple of weeks later, when I bumped into him in the lobby coming and going, he stopped me to say that his map had a publish date of 1980 and allowed that perhaps the country might have changes its name since. I hadn’t forgotten about the whole thing, but I figured he would, so it was a bit of a surprise. It was probably the closest I ever saw a CEO come to admitting being wrong about something.

The Case of Soda

Our QA group was pretty determined to get a list of changes from the software dev team every time they gave us a new release. The devs, on the other hand, had to be nagged a bit to put together release notes. It was the early 90s and every coder was a cowboy in those days and their code submission entries carried barely comprehensible comments, nothing you could automate a release document out of.

One of the developers was annoyed by having to put together these notes with each release because he didn’t think we read them. So he put at the bottom of one he wrote that he would buy a case of soda for the first person to read down that far and come and talk to him. My cube neighbor Geoff beat me to it. The devs kept writing the release notes with builds.

The Color Blind Cable Guy

With the first Performa 2400bps modems there was a request by Apple to use a particular vendor to assemble them. For tax reasons, there was some benefit if we used an assembly facility based on a native American reservation down in New Mexico rather that our usual local assembly. We worked it out and they setup and assembled all of the early 2400bps modems. They did a good job, were on time and within budget.

But there was a quality control issue. An unlikely number of modems were not functional when the customers setup their system. They called Apple, who replace the modem, but Apple saw this was happening a lot and came to use to find out what was going on. Our hardware guys, led by our hardware design lead, who was of partial native blood himself, went down to inspect what was going. That meant flying into Albuquerque, driving for four hours or so to get to the reservation, then spending a day going down the line to check how things were being done. Jim, the hardware lead, said he got on well with the team there saying that they were of the same temperament as he and they too wanted to get to the source of the issue.

They finally got to the last stage of the process where they were putting the modems in their plastic cases and soldering the serial/power cable to the circuit board when Jim saw the person doing the soldering attaching the wires wrong. The wires were, by power cord convention of the time, black, red, and green. It turned out that the guy doing the soldering was red/green colorblind and had just been guessing. There was some embarrassment at this revelation, but they swapped him to another part of the line and had somebody who could distinguish the cable colors take over. The quality problems disappeared going forward.

Supra Invaders

Finally, a reminder of how we got under the skin of some of our competitors. When your competitors start trying to cast you as the villain, even jokingly, you know you are doing well.

At a trade show in 1995 a couple of our reps were walking by the Supra booth. Supra Corporation was one of our key competitors in the Mac desktop modem market, and in their both on their demo machines they had a little Space Invaders knock off came called Supra Invaders.

It featured a Supra modem at the bottom of the screen shooting Global Village logos that flew around the top of the screen dropping bombs, all over a background featuring a wrecked Teleport Platinum modem. I still have a copy of it on my old PowerBook 190cs. Unfortunately, I cannot get that unit hooked up to the internet to move screen shots. It has a floppy drive, but only a MacOS formatted one, and none of my other machines has had a floppy drive for more than a decade. So here is a horrible phone picture of it.

Supra Invaders

Here is the “about” info for the app.

About Supra Invaders

Of course, our reps got a copy from them and it was all over our office within a week of them getting back. And I guess it still survives today, even if it is effectively locked on my old laptop.

Supra itself ended up being bought by Diamond Multimedia that went on to make early MP3 players. I had a Diamond Rio 500 way way back in the day before the iPod came to Windows.

I think that about wraps up Global Village. There were other dumb things that happened, such as my boss sending me to a network training class focused on IBM’s token ring architecture, which was on its way out and ended up being just so much trivia in the back of my brain. And there is one more post I am saving for later, for a 30th anniversary of an event. But the next stop will be the big island, away from modems and into other aspects of telephony.

The tales so far:

The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems

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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:

When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village

The Death of eWorld

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Apple’s eWorld wasn’t necessarily the worst idea they came up with in the 90s before the return of Steve Jobs. But it was so badly executed and came at such a bad time that its demise was pretty much inevitable. That it represented at times some of the greatest hubris a company well known for its high regard for itself has exhibited only adds some spice to the tale.

The eWorld Box unfolded – before iMacs there was eWorld

From a distance, the whole thing seemed like a reasonable idea.

Apple had an online service already called AppleLink. It was awkward and painful to use, but in an era when almost nobody had a dial up service option for support to get things like drivers without having physical access to Apple, it was ahead of its time. The whole thing ran on GE’s online service, which also supported its GEnie online offering. In 1985 this was ahead of the curve.

By 1992 AppleLink was dated. Even its modem connection scripts looked like something from a bygone era. And America Online was doing things with a happy, friendly UI that left GEnie and CompuServe looking like command line relics.

To simplify the story greatly, Apple decided to make an AOL-like online service using AOL’s Macintosh client, which they had licensed.

The established version of the tale of eWorld, which you can read over at the Wikipedia article I have linked, is that the service never really caught on and Apple shut it down after not too long and moved all their stuff to the web, which is where everything was headed in any case.

What that very brief version of the tale lacks is the color of what was really going on at Apple and the eWorld team.

At the time I happened to be dating a woman who was working with the eWorld team and she had no end of tales about how full of themselves the eWorld team was, how they were absolutely sure they would show AOL and everybody else how it was done, and how absolutely convinced they were nothing could stop ultimate success.

I heard several times that the cockiness of the venture came straight from the top where the catch phrase was something along the lines of, “I’ve already made up my mind, but go ahead and give me your opinion.” The meaning was that there was nobody who could tell them or teach them anything, they knew it all and were going to bring Apple to new heights. Success was assured merely because it was an Apple product.

The idea that the world wouldn’t bow down and acknowledge their genius for serving up a re-skinned version of AOL, with less total content and very little to distinguish the service, never seemed to occur to them. It was, from my vantage point, the height of hubris for the “sans Steve Jobs” era of the mid 90s… and that is saying something, because the company has always been extremely full of itself.

The eWorld project happened to line up with Apple’s attempt to expand its hardware market penetration via the Macintosh Performa line of computers. Computers, up to that point, were very much aimed at hobbyists and the technically minded. They were not end user friendly. Even Macs had their issues on that front.

One key issue was once you bought a PC and got it running… now what? You need software to do things and peripherals and guidance and blah blah blah. So the Performa line sought to bundle a bunch of that together with a guided user experience.

That included adding in a modem, and Global Village was the company that Apple chose to partner with on that front. It started with the Teleport Bronze II 2400bps modem, which was fine and dandy in 1993, but modem speeds were rising and Apple did not want to be left behind.

Enter the Teleport Gold II.

GV already HAD a 14,400bps stand alone modem, the Teleport Gold, but it cost too much. Apple wanted a cost reduced model so as to keep the Performa prices in line. They asked GV to develop a low cost 14,400bps modem using a special minimal chip set that would offload the error correction and data compression onto the computer CPU. We did that, put it in the same inexpensive case that the Bronze II had been put in, with its cheap design, and the Performa team was happy with it. In fact, they were happy enough that we did several additional modem projects with them because the Teleport Gold II was fine and cheap and filled their need.

It was, however, a different chip set than our original and we had to write a modem driver specifically for it for all of the major online services. You couldn’t just use the original Teleport Gold driver. And when I say “modem driver” I am over stating the case, as it was in most cases just an set of initialization strings for various modes that the software could call up and send to the modem. The exception was the AppleLink script, because AppleLink pre-dated sanity in communication software design. But even that wasn’t so bad.

So, for example, AOL took the driver we wrote for them, made it part of their next update, and once people had the driver the Teleport Gold II worked just fine.

Likewise, we wrote a driver for eWorld… it was the same as the AOL driver because eWorld was just reskinned AOL… and they apparently threw it away.

My assessment years down the road was that having to use AOL’s software galled the eWorld team… like many big companies Apple often has a “not invented here” attitude… and so they were determined to write and own every aspect of the software that they could, which included the modem driver for the Teleport II.

To this day I remember the name of the person they gave that task to, and I wasn’t even on the Teleport II project. I sat next to the person who ran that GV side of the project and he was smarter and more competent than I ever was. But the person on the eWorld side, they didn’t know what they were doing. We would get an updated beta of their software, try it with all our modems, then tell them that the Teleport Gold II driver did not work… and they would ignore us.

We reported this at every beta update, sent them our copy of the driver multiple times, warned the Performa group that the eWorld team was ignoring us, and basically tried to head off the problem as best we could. And we were ignored.

So, when the first Performa models shipped with the Teleport Gold II, they wouldn’t connect to eWorld. This was kind of a big deal as the eWorld team hoped that all of these new, entry level users would make up a big part of their customer base, that a whole generation of new Mac owners would be guided into the online world by their software.

Things got heated. VPs at their end were calling our CEO demanding something be done. There were conference calls to review the problem, with the eWorld team taking the stance that the Teleport II was a bad modem that simply did not work.

And we would point out that AOL had no problems with it, that the modem driver was the issue, that we had reported to them that the modem driver was the issue on multiple occasions… all documented… and had provided a working modem driver every time we pointed this out, only to be ignored.

When faced with this the person at their end who wrote their driver would try to shift blame, complain that our documentation was bad, and basically try to throw any possible argument against the wall to defend their choice to ignore us. And that person was able to convince the eWorld management of their case.

Their obstinate stance was such that there had to be multiple calls over the course of weeks to re-litigate the issue again and again. They were going to find a way to blame somebody else for their screw up. I actually sat in on one of those calls, even though it wasn’t my projects, because I couldn’t believe how hard the eWorld team was resisting the correct and obvious solution. This behavior prolonged getting an updated driver…OUR driver… into the product. And when they finally did, there was an extremely sarcastic release note about the awful Teleport Gold II modem finally being fixed with their software. They couldn’t let it go, they couldn’t own up, they couldn’t admit their error.

But it was too late. The Performa computers came with lots of software pre-installed, including AOL, and AOL worked with the modem and the new users were much more likely to know about, and know somebody on, AOL in any case. So there was no bounty of new users for eWorld from the successful Performa product line.

Now, to be clear, eWorld, as it stood, was never going to be a long term success. Even if every Performa user with a Teleport II modem was able to sign up for the service, there wasn’t a lot of “there” there to be seen and a Macintosh only service was always going to be an outlier. There was no compelling reason to use eWorld and it was only outstanding in its mediocrity both in design and execution. The Performa gaffe just made the end come a bit more quickly because even had it met all of its goals, the coming of direct connection to the internet as the default route for most users in the next couple of years would have sealed its fate the way it sealed the fate of AOL.

I mean sure, AOL is still technically a thing. It survives based on a lot of boomers at my mother-in-law’s end of the generation who still get their email from the site and still pay $4.95 a month for the privileged. (True story, my mother-in-law still pays for AOL.) But that is a legacy business, destined to die off with the aging clientele. So eWorld was going to die sooner or later. I feel pretty confident Steve Jobs would have killed it had it not be put in the ground before his return. It has an aesthetic he would have despised.

In the end, eWorld’s failure was arguably a good thing. Sure, it was a big waste of money, but hardly the biggest one in that era. And in the end Apple rightly threw in the towel on running their own online service. No more AppleLink or eWorld. Everything was moved to the World Wide Web. Apple.com was the destination… and that was going to be the future anyway so it was better that they got on the right path a couple years earlier than they might have otherwise.

So in March of 1996, less than two years after its launch, eWorld was shut down by Apple. It made barely a ripple in the expanding online world and only the few users who found some sort of community there really noticed its passing.

Wikipedia – eWorld
MacWorld – Remembering eWorld

Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market

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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:

Tech Support at the Village

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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.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi