Boca Research

» see bocaresearch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The modems at home in Turkey started at 14.4k and finished at 56k, by way of 33.6k, and I have no idea what brand any of them were. That describes the market I was buying in rather than my memory of it: the box told you the speed and the chipset and stopped there. Boca Research is the company that lost its life to exactly that, an American board maker in a product category where the name on the card had stopped carrying information.

For about ten years it worked very well. Boca Research was founded in Boca Raton, Florida in 1985, listed on NASDAQ as BOCI in 1992, and by 1996 reported net sales of $153,524,000. An independent market research firm quoted in its own annual report put it fourth in North America for modem vendor share by units shipped in 1995. Data communications had gone from 56 percent of sales in 1994 to 85 percent in 1996, and a company that had built every sort of expansion card was now a modem company whether it meant to be or not.

Then it fell off a cliff. Sales dropped 54.3 percent in a single year, to $70,207,000 in 1997. By 1999 they were $32.8 million, by 2000 they were $14.4 million, and in the final year, 2001, the whole company turned over $3,858,000. That is a 97.5 percent collapse in five years from a business that had been profitable and ranked.

~ the record ~

~ four blocks from IBM ~

The founding is the best story here. Tim Farris had co-founded Quadram in 1981 with Leland Strange, sold out of it in 1984, and moved to Boca Raton. The location was deliberate. IBM had designed the PC at its Boca Raton complex, and Farris put his new company four blocks away so he could hire the engineers who already lived there and already knew the machine.

Farris handed the chief executive job to Anthony Zalenski in September 1994 and gave up the chairmanship himself the following April. Zalenski came from Motorola UDS, the modem subsidiary, which was the right hire for 1994. By the time the end came the chief executive was Robert Ferguson, who had been on the board since 1993 and took the chair in May 1997, and who became CEO in January 2000 at the age of seventy-six.

~ the risk factor they printed every year ~

The grim detail is that Boca Research knew. Its 1996 annual report, the one recording the all-time peak, contains a paragraph about a trend in original PC manufacturing to integrate additional functionality onto the system board or into chipsets, and says the company's strategy is to broaden its product range to offset the decreasing opportunities for PC enhancement products. That is a company writing its own cause of death into a filing while having its best year, and then shipping boards for four more.

The 1997 filing is where the floor goes. It blames the 54.3 percent revenue fall partly on consumers holding off while the industry argued about competing 56Kbps technologies, a standard that did not arrive until February 1998. It records OEM sales falling from $86 million in 1996 to $31 million in 1997, alongside a 22 percent drop in average selling price. It also states plainly where the OEM work had gone: to offshore manufacturers pricing aggressively to the PC vendors who were integrating the modem into the machine. Gross margin, which was 8.4 percent of sales in 1998, was 1.6 percent in 1999. The 1996 payroll tells you why none of this could be absorbed: of 339 full-time employees, 215 were in manufacturing and operations and 23 were in engineering and product development.

~ the Macintosh modem, bought at the wrong moment ~

On 18 June 1998 Boca Research completed the purchase of Global Village Communication's modem business for $9,855,206 in cash and notes, which bought the brand, the TelePort line for the Macintosh and the GlobalFax software. It worked for exactly one year. Global Village branded sales were $22,588,000 in the remainder of 1998, $12,958,000 in 1999 and $4.3 million in 2000, and Boca's own filing explains the drop: Apple started letting G3 buyers choose an Ethernet card instead of the internal 56K modem and ran a promotion around it.

So Boca Research bought the leading Macintosh modem business and then watched Apple make the Macintosh modem optional. The 1998 revenue line looked flat only because of the acquisition, which meant the underlying business had fallen again and nobody reading the top line could see it.

~ what the shell became ~

The dismantling ran to a schedule. On 3 March 2000 the manufacturing assets went to Boundless Manufacturing Services for $1.7 million, with Boundless taking over the lease and the factory staff. On 28 July 2000 certain assets went to Zoom Telephonics, one of the five competitors Boca had named in its 1996 report. Shareholders approved an amendment to the articles of incorporation at a special meeting on 29 September, and on 10 October 2000 the company stopped being Boca Research, Inc. and became Inprimis, Inc., with the ticker changing from BOCI to INPM the same day. Nasdaq delisted it to the bulletin board on 26 October 2001, and on 3 January 2002 Ener1 Holdings bought 47,126,416 shares, a majority of the company, for $1.2 million. That registration number at the SEC, 895642, is still in use today by Ener1.

The strangest part is the website. Zoom put a notice on bocaresearch.com explaining that it had acquired the brand and trademark rights in August 2000, that it had no current plans for new Boca branded modems, and that products made before the handover remained the responsibility of Inprimis. That notice was still being served on 17 October 2025, twenty-five years later, re-wrapped in WordPress but with the original rollover graphics still in the markup. Sometime after that the domain changed hands again, and the archived copy from July 2026 is a Cambodian gambling page. The competitor who bought the name kept the tombstone standing for a quarter of a century, and then the ground was sold out from under it.

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