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Tech Support - August 1992 to January 1993 Quality Assurance Engineer - February 1993 to April 1996 Global Village Communication 1989-1999 I worked here, first in technical support, then in Quality Assurance. Many of my friends worked with me at Global Village Communication, including Nick Chinn, Geoff Spaeth, Terry Li, Steven Pratt, and Jefferson Johnson. Here is me, at my worst ever, at Global Village.
That is me in the front row on the right. Terry Li is front row on the left. We both have much longer hair. Terry simply had longer hair back then. I, on the other hand, made the unwise statement that I would neither shave nor cut my hair until we shipped the PowerPort Mercury for the PowerBook 500 series computer. The project was six months past due when it shipped. "Grizzly Adams" comments abounded.
Global Village's claim to fame was the idea of holding down a modifier key
(the option key by default) and then going to the File menu and having the word
Print change into the word Fax. Thus, you could fax from any application
from which you could print, with only a few exceptions. By 1994 or so,
Global Village was claiming to have invented this feature in their marketing
documents. In fact, I had a Prometheus modem which had this feature before
Global Village was founded. Engineering knew this of course but marketing was not interested. I worked on internal modems for Apple Machintosh PowerBook Computers, though I stopped that about the time that they introduced PC Card slots. The other thing I worked on was the TelePort Platinum, a modem which lived on
until recently in a slightly modified form.
This is certainly the best selling external high speed modem ever in the Macintosh market. It jumped to that position in June 1995 and remained there until January 2001. It was then replace by a new modem from the new owners of the GV name.
The management at Global Village, however, didn't like modems. They wanted to make network fax and remote access servers and they wanted to get into the Windows market. They failed at both, but they managed to buy and destroy two companies in the process, Sofnet and a company in the UK called KNX.
After it was swallowed and spat out, KNX, or what remained of it, got sold off to Mitel in late 1997. KNX, by the way, doesn't stand for anything. It is supposed to be pronounced as "Connects." Yeah, that is what I said when I heard it. SofNet and their FaxWorks product is a less clear story.
A company called the Keller Group has the license for FaxWorks for OS/2. They apparently did the OS/2 version for SofNet back when OS/2 was a viable product, but retained rights to it. The product is still available and supported.
While Global Village dropped the FaxWorks line and disbanded SofNet, a company called SNET (hrmmm...) sells a product called FaxWorks now. Could it be? Anyway, Global Village sent a bunch of deadwood to Marietta, Georgia, home of SofNet then closed the place down. (SofNet, not Marietta.) We should be happy over some of the people they exported out of state. One of the few public services the company ever did.
In 1998 the company formerly known as Global Village Communication sold the GV name, the #1 name in modems in the Apple Macintosh market, to Boca Research. (Boca Research is now called Inprimis)
The remaining company, called OneWorld Systems struggled on for a short period of time trying to sell their vaporware network fax and remote access severs, then went out of business in December of 1999. But this didn't happen until they had actually bilked Hambrecht and Quist (now part of Chase) and Kleiner Perkins out of a combined $10 million investment. Shows you that the Venture Capitalists can be fooled.
What OneWorld Systems did was sell their remaining assets to a company up the street called Tut Systems. (Some sort of King Tut reference there, but then the logo is a pyramid, which is not something King Tut had, but I digress.) I am not clear on what Tut does or why they should desire OneWorlds assets. Maybe they just wanted some cheap cubicle material.
In August 2000, Boca Research sold the Global Village name, as well as its own name, and all of its modem business to Zoom Telephonics. Zoom killed all the GV hardware and now ships their own mediocre products with the GV logo on them.
Zoom also sells modems under the Hayes brand name. Hayes, for those too young to recall, was the first company with a high speed (1200bps) reliable consumer grade modem. In 1981 the Hayes Smartmodem set the standard for what modems would look like for the next 15 years; flat little boxes with blinky lights on the front and a 25-pin connector on the back. The Hayes AT command set is the default modem command language for all consumer modems, and will likely remain so. At one time I knew it by heart. Confused by all of this? Yeah, and I didn't even bring up any of my personal anecdotes about the place!
For some more details about Global Village, you can check out Nick Chinn's web site, Dead Dog Party, which has an "Inside Global Village" section. (And Dead Dog Party doesn't mean anything gross. Go read what it really means.) Feel free to email me corrections or comments. I wrote this up pretty quickly and probably mis-stated more than a few things!
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