The Death of eWorld

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.

Related:

• Wikipedia – eWorld
• MacWorld – Remembering eWorld

Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market

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:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village

Tech Support at the Village

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.

I Get a Modem then Start a BBS

This is what I might call a “bridge episode” in a TV series.  Not a post that has a real story unto itself, but more a bunch of things that happen that ended up having a large impact later down the line… as in, my entire adult professional career.  Everything I have done in pretty much the last 35 years for work, and all the additional tales in the series, it all starts here.

I have related somewhere in the past here on a couple of occasions about how I ended up buying Potshot’s 1200bps Apple modem from him back in 1986 to connect to my Apple //e, then upgrading to a Zoom 2400bps modem.

Apple and Zoom modem pictures gleaned from the internet

You could only do so many things with a modem back in the day.  I played some expensive online games.  I called local the local BBS community.  I was able to do my mainframe assignments for school because I knew somebody in the lab who gave me the dial-in number.  I just had to go pick up my print outs.  But it didn’t add up to all that much.  I still spent the vast majority of my computer time offline.  In part that was because the closest phone where I was living was hung on the kitchen wall, so to get a line across the place to my room meant popping the phone off the wall, hooking up a line, and spooling it out of the kitchen, through the family room, into the room where my computer lay.  I actually bought a phone fifty foot line on a reel to make this more efficient.

Probably bought it at Fry’s no less

I actually still have that reel.  I plucked it out of the garage last weekend… it was sitting in an old milk crate we refer to as “the cable box” where I have tossed a bunch of cables I might need some day.  So when I was playing Stellar Emperor… even when I won Stellar Emperor… I was doing it over a phone line dragged across the house, mostly in the wee hours of the night.

It helped that I worked 3pm to midnight at Safeway most nights so my house mate was asleep and unlikely to pick up the extension that was in their room and screw up my connection.  But it was annoying for both of us when I was trying to log in during the day for something.

It wasn’t until I bought a Mac a year later that I really started dialing into things.

Dual floppies on day one

First of all, my Mac SE had a hard drive.  I actually bought the dual floppy SE model… as an Apple II user having dual floppies was seriously a baseline requirement… and then bought an external 70MB hard drive.

That was HUGE at the time.  Most internal drives were 10-20MB at the time, and having a 40MB was high living, so a 70MB drive, I had all the space in the world and clearly needed to fill it up. (And so begins a lifetime obsession with having enough hard drive space.  To me a half full drive means I need more space.)

Anyway, having hard drive space meant downloading things was very much more likely… certainly when compared to having to store things on 143KB 5.25″ Apple II floppies.  And I had been exposed to the internet at that point, though my university at the time was extremely stingy with access.  So I went by a company called Portal Information Network, which was being run out of a residential house a few blocks from the Apple campus on Mariani Drive in Cupertino.  They were one of the first places to sell access to a dial up internet shell account.

I had an email address @cup.portal.com at just about the very moment that such email addresses were being fully supported.  You could still find servers that needed a fully enumerated address… basically the user name then all the servers in between your email server and the destination so the message knew how to get there… when I was first logging in.

Also, if you had the cup.portal.com domain as your domain you were a bit of a pariah on UseNet because the educational institutional purists were incensed that somebody was letting randos onto their internet in exchange for cash.  It debased the whole thing in their minds.  You had to earn your right to be there, you have to be special and invited if you want to argue about whether or not elves had pointy ears on rec.arts.books.tolkien.

We were only pariahs for so long… in part because there were not so many of us, but mostly because more services started selling similar access, culminating in the Eternal September in 1993, when online services began offering and promoting internet connectivity.  That and the NSCA Mosiac web browser would suddenly make the internet a public place.

That was all kind of cool, but in 1988 I was more interested in BBSes and files and local message board and such.

At that point I called up Pacific Bell and got a separate phone line run into my room.  They came out and ran a box with punch downs for up to six lines, bolting it to the back of the house as part of their modular upgrade program, since the original line was pretty much hard wired from the pole.

My friend Bill and I ran a bundle of twisted pair that had 8 pairs in it from the box and up through the floor into my room.  We only needed one pair, but he happened to have enough of the 8 pair wire sitting around that we just used that rather than buying some new wire.  In fact, he left the box… one of those setups where the wire is on a spool inside the box so you can reel it out on a job site… and i suspect the box had been scavenged from a job site.

So now I had a dedicated data line and could use the modem whenever I wanted.  The 50 phone cable reel when into a milk crate I refer to as “the cable box” to await that time when I would next need it.  I still have that crate out in our garage today and it was there waiting for this moment.

So I spent a lot of time on local BBSes to the point that I wanted to run my own.  This was very much analogous to my spending a lot of time reading MMO blogs 18 years back and deciding to start my own blog.  I always feel a little bit self conscious on somebody else’s site, so wanted to have my own.

So in 1990 I found a Mac Plus and a 2400 bps modem… which were becoming cheap, which at the time meant sub-$150… and called up Pac Bell and had them pull another line down to the junction box on the back of the house.  As noted above, it was an upgraded the junction that could accommodate half a dozen lines, each with an RJ-11 jack so you could plug a phone in to determine if any line issues were on the phone company’s side of things or if it was related to the wiring in the house itself… because if it was the latter, it was your problem unless you bought the expensive home wiring coverage contract.

The phone company did that pretty quickly.  They were big on selling more lines at that point.  That monthly unlimited local dialing plan revenue was making them rich and as long as they had lines on the switch not being used, they might as well get money for them.  The average phone call was under a minute at that point.  That could never possibly come back to bite them in the ass.

After that it was easy enough for me to use one of the free pairs of wire in the cable we already ran under the house, connecting into the junction box and then an RJ-11 jack in my  office.  I had grabbed a copy of the Mac BBS software Second Site, formerly Red Ryder Host and got myself setup as a Sysop, the person who runs a BBS.

How do you get people to call your BBS?  Modems were pretty rare still, online services like CompuServe were relatively expensive, and the internet was almost exclusively academically focused.  How do you get the word out?

At the time somebody was maintaining and distributing a 408 area code BBS list.  It was a simple text file that they uploaded to various BBSes every month which addressed the user side of the problem; how do I even find a BBS to call?

So I put together a similar list with a kid (relative to me in age at least) named Adam for the 415 area code, focused on the peninsula from the SF county line to the boarder with 408 in Sunnyvale.  We updated it every month, uploaded it to every BBS we could find, and it was generally a success.  People began to call my BBS.

Then there was the problem of how to get them to call back again.

I had originally envisioned my BBS as being focused on sound files, and named it appropriately for that.  I had a Farallon Mac Recorder for my MacSE and had digitized many fun sounds from The Simpsons, Star Trek, and whatever, that being all the rage at the time.  It included a real sound editor software package, sophisticated stuff for the time. (The software later ended up being owned by Sony and I bought a copy of that maybe 15 years back.)

Mac Recorder back of box image scavenged from the internet

So I started with a selection of sounds.  But like every going concern, people want NEW stuff every time they visit.  So I did what most sysops did, I went looking at other BBSes to find updates and new things which I would turn around and upload to my site.  Must have new content.

The first thing was, of course, my monthly 415 BBS list, along with the 408 version of that.  I lived practically astride the 415/408 boarder, and could easily throw a rock from my front door in Mountain View into Sunnyvale and the 408 area code, something I was once admonished to stop as the point of proximity had been firmly established.

The next was a little Mac focused newsletter called TidBits.  I was on the email distribution list for it and would upload each edition to the BBS.  A couple of years back I ran across Tidbits on Twitter, still publishing regularly.  I also found out that its author, Adam Engst, was a couple years younger than me.

And I posted stuff to the forum on the BBS… what we would now call a BBS on the web was just a subset of what a BBS did back in the day.

This began to attract regulars and I ended up having a pretty active discussion form on the BBS. (I keep writing “on the site” and changing it to “on the BBS” because it was never a “site” on the internet.)

And, within a year one of my regulars asked if I was interested in a job.  I was working at in accounting at Koala… or the company that bought the Koala name and product line including the Apple II Koala Pad… which mostly involved calling up Ingram Micro to ask when they were going to pay us.  They were the largest software distributor in the US and treated small companies like us badly.  They would sign terms for net 30 payments, with a 5% discount if they paid within ten days, then pay us in 90 days with the discount deducted.  Their attitude was that we should be grateful then distributed our software at all.

I did spend some time calling up school districts as well.  A few ordered replacement Koala Pads for their aging Apple IIs directly from us… and they were generally late to pay as well.  We were in a minor recession.  It was early 1991, the cold war was winding down, the military was having a last hurrah in Kuwait before a massive draw down, the defense industry, which was a foundational element of Silicon Valley at the time, was laying off tons of people, and it was rippling across the country.  Also the state of Michigan kept calling, demanding we collect sales tax on items sold to their residents and send it to them, a clear violation of the interstate commerce section of the constitution, so I put those into the “ignore” basket… the one on the floor that the cleaning staff dealt with over night.

And during that time a user of my BBS named Larry sent me a message on the BBS asking if I wanted a job.  He was the support manager at a hard drive company… the same one that made my hard drive… and needed somebody to do support and repair on his team.  That sounded better than dealing with accounts receivable issues all day long, and I knew all about SCSI hard drive… I had three by then… so what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing underlines your absolute ignorance of a product and what end users want to do with it than working in tech support.  It turns out I knew about 5% of what I needed to know about SCSI hard drives.  But I learned quickly.  That lasted about eight months.

A lawsuit related to Rodime ended up forcing the company to shut down.  We got a last paycheck and were sent home.  My first Silicon Valley layoff!  But I had used my BBS and modem knowlegde while I was there and established myself a bit.  I had setup a special login on my BBS for our customers to go and download the latest driver updates.  But now that was through.

I went past ComputerWare on the way home and saw they were hiring.  I went in, told them about the company I had work at, but SCSI hard drive knowledge was something they had.  However, when I mentioned I knew about modems and also ran a BBS, that excited them.  I was hired.

That was a fun job, one of the few retail experiences I enjoyed.  And I was the modem guy in the Sunnyvale store, eventually becoming the service tech.  It was also an expensive job as I had access to all sorts of software and hardware at an employee discount.  It is possible I spent more than I earned at that job.  I wrote a tale from those days previously, centered around CD-ROM drives and the game Spaceship Warlock.

My boss there ended up getting a job at a company called Global Village, perhaps the premier modem company in the Macintosh world, and realized that his method of solving modem issues was to come and ask me.  So he immediately recommended me for a position in support there.  Once again, as the guy who actually ran a BBS and knew about modems on purpose, I was something of a standout and got the job.

That was in 1992 and was what I consider the end of my “having a bunch of random jobs” part of my life, with fast food and retail jobs, and the beginning of the “something that looks like a career when listed out on a resume” section, like I was a real adult or something.

It was also the anchor which tied me to telephony and telephone related technologies for at least the next 25 years.

As for the BBS, it ran from 1990 through to late 1995.  At its peak it had three phone lines attached to it, two for users, sporting high end “support all the protocols” US Robotics Courier modems, and a third line with a lesser modem dedicated to FidoNet communications.

Around 1992 I changed from Second Sight software to Hermes to run the BBS  (That Hermes article is a good timeline of BBSes in general) which had better support, including the ability to use the then Apple Modem Tool (later the Communications Toolbox) which showed up with System 7, which allowed IP connections.  That, technically, enabled a fourth line into the BBS over our home network, which ran on 5Base-T coax Ethernet, which sounds primitive today, but was crazy ahead of its time in 1992.

The end for the BBS came when my housing situation was upended and I moved into an apartment where I wasn’t going to be able to have more than one phone line.  The BBS was shut down.  But it had quite an impact on my life.  I met a bunch of people, some of whom I ended up working with.  I went to the BBS crew for hiring needs because, again, people who knew modem stuff.

It also gave me a few side gigs.  I ended up setting up BBSes for a couple of companies and a local beer brewing user group, the latter paying me for my services with two cases of extremely excellent ale.

I still have dreams every so often, to this day, where I am in one of the places I used to live but it is today and I open up a closet and the BBS is still sitting there, online and running, forgotten for years, patiently waiting for my return.  I have, over the years, reached way more people with this blog that I ever did with the old BBS.  That is the nature of the web and search engines.  But the interactions on the BBS were often much more personal.  It was like having a blog with file downloads and a couple dozen regulars who would drop in regularly to comment and ask how things were going.

That ends, to some extent, the random goof aspect of my times with the telephone and gets into my career with it and the foibles and silly times that ended up creating.

Past posts in the series:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What your area code used to say about your location

35 Years of Connected Computers

I realized the other day that at some point 35 years ago, during the latter half of the summer of 1986, Potshot… or Skronk or Fergorin or whatever names I’ve used to identify him on the blog over the years… sold me a modem.

I think it was in August, but honestly it could have been July or September.  It was a cash deal and no receipts were kept.  It was an Apple 1200 bps modem and I took it home, then went over to the used computer store that was close by… because used computers were a business then… and bought a Super Serial Card for my Apple //e so I could hook the modem up to it.

Apple and Zoom modem pictures gleaned from the internet, the latter being me second modem

At that point I had to do something with it.  I dialed up a BBS or two with some primitive terminal emulation software, then I started looking at online services, landing on GEnie.

There I ended up playing Stellar Emperor almost right away.  Somebody there told me to go buy the Apple ][ terminal emulator that CompuServe sold which was light, emulated well, and had ten macro keys, which would become all important in playing Stellar Emperor and Stellar Warrior. (I did a recap of my 80s online gaming a while back.)

I also never had to go sit in the computer lab in college anymore.  They had a dial up number I could log in through.  I still had to walk across campus to pick up my printouts for projects, usually from SPSS, a software package I am continually surprised to find still exists.  It is almost as old as I am.

I’ve told those tales before here.  I’ve even charted out timelines for various things, including platforms and connectivity.  I’ve written a lot down on the blog over the last 15 years.

Game Platforms

I should probably update that one a bit.  I can add iPhone to it, and a Nintendo Switch.  But mostly it has been Windows PC gaming since Y2K.

Connectivity

That one I really need to update.  I think it was about 2015 that we swapped over to Comcast for a cable modem connection.  That runs at 100 MBits.

100 megabits per second.  One hundred million bits per second.  That is a long way from 1,200 bits per second back in 1986.  I would need more than 80,000 little Apple modems humming along in parallel to even come close to my throughput today.  1986 me would be impressed.

Hell, 2006 me would be impressed.  We’ve come a long way.

Back in 1986 I was kind of an oddball, demographically speaking.  I mean, just having a personal computer was still kind of odd, though growing increasingly common.  But having one that connected to other computers, that was really not a thing for many people.

For a long time the idea of a computer being connected to other computers was kind of niche.  One of the jobs I had there were several Apple ][s hooked up to a central Corvus drive that would share accounting data and output reports.  And the stuff in the lab at school was all wired up, but for most people a computer was a stand alone unit.  If you wanted to send somebody data you printed it out or saved it to a floppy disk.

In 1991, when I was working for a company that specialized in hard drives I got a call from a guy who had moved from there to a data recovery firm asking me about modems.  I was the recognized “modem expert” largely because I ran a BBS at the time, which made me the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.  He had a client down in LA who really needed the data from a drive they had recovered and wanted to know how long it would take to send to him via modem.  They had a 2,400 bps modem handy to transfer the 40mb of data.

I told him it would be quicker to drive down to LA and hand him the drive in person.  I didn’t even get into the complexity of queuing up however many files and sending the one by one and then sorting through them at the far end.  He was discouraged, but understood when I did the math.  It was kind of a surprise that the client at the far end had a modem, even in 1991.

Modems didn’t really become a thing to have until 1994 or so when the World Wide Web suddenly hove into view for many people.  I moved from the hard drive company to a modem manufacturer… again based on the fact that I ran a BBS so knew something about modems… where our big selling point was that you could send a fax from your Apple PowerBook.  Hard copies were still a thing.  Remember faxing lunch orders into a restaurant or getting fax spam ads?  No?  You’re kind of young, aren’t you?

But with the web, the internet became a thing for everybody.  The rush to get online began and here in Silicon Valley there was a good year to 18 months when on a typical weeknight you could lift up the handset on your home phone and not be sure you would get a dial tone.  The phone company, built on the idea that most people make a few five minute calls, was suddenly faced with a bunch of people who would dial up to their ISP when they got home from work and leave their connection pinned up until they went to bed.   Checking your email was kind of a big deal.

There was an transition point from where a computer went from being a stand alone device, to being something that could connect to an online service, to a device whose whole existence revolves around connectivity.

Back in the 80s and 90s having a computer online meant you could be some sort of cyber ninja computer hacker.  Now having a computer not connected has a special mystic.  We have a special term for it even, an “air gapped” computer.

I mean think about how much you do every day that required connectivity.  My job, which has been work from home for 18 months now, pretty much required online connectivity all the time for the last 20 years.  The network being down meant no work was getting done.  And now I am at home and that connection is work, commerce, and entertainment.  I have a 10 channel package from Comcast for my cable TV service because they want so badly to demonstrate that people are not cord cutting.

So far this year we have watched live TV on January 6th and during the Olympics.

Meanwhile, “always on” internet is essential.  All my many screens, and screens have proliferated in the last decade, seem to now demand some sort of internet access.  I remember back in the day when my daughter and I got our Nintendo DS Lites.  Internet connectivity was kind of a rare thing.  Setting up Nintendo WiFi for Pokemon was a pain.  I think only Mario Kart really worked well with it.

Now if I pick up the Switch Lite somewhere out of WiFi range is starts acting like a junkie in withdraw.

And I suspect the trend will continue in that direction.  I’ve resisted wifi enabled appliances and stuff, given their legendary security vulnerabilities, but I am sure some day they will become mandatory.