Boston Computer Exchange

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

~ the obituary ~

Boston Computer Exchange was a list. Alexander Randall 5th and Cameron Hall, a married couple in Boston, kept a record of who had a used computer to sell and who wanted one, and billed the seller a commission once the two of them had got off the phone. They started it in 1982 at their dining room table. The list was paper first and then moved onto a dual-floppy IBM PC running an Alpha 2 database.

In March 1983 that database went up on Delphi, the Boston dial-in service, and fresh data was posted every day from then on. It ran on YellowData too, and later on Boston CitiNet. Buyers browsed over a modem and then reached for the telephone, because there was no way to close a card payment online and would not be for another decade. After enough deals went bad the Exchange started holding the money itself, which is escrow, arrived at here through experience rather than design.

Wikipedia files it as the world's first e-commerce company, and that needs trimming. Michael Aldrich had a videotex teleshopping system working in England in 1979. CompuServe opened its Electronic Mall in April 1984, not the 1989 that the same article gives, although BoCoEx did have a store in it. What survives the trimming is narrower and better: a working online marketplace with daily inventory and a commission on every closed sale, built by two people who were not a computer company, years before the web existed at all.

All of this had happened before I owned a modem. The Exchange did its real work between 1982 and the mid-nineties. I was not dialing up from Turkey until 1998. The problem it solved is one I recognize anyway. When I wanted to know what a used graphics card was worth, I read a forum thread where people posted what they had paid for theirs. BoCoEx had to compile a weekly index and get trade magazines to print it, because in 1985 there was nowhere else for that number to live.

~ the case file ~

~ the weekly price report ~

The BoCoEx Index was a weekly report of what the most-traded models had actually changed hands for on the Exchange, laid out like a stock table. A futurist named Wes Thomas suggested it, and it started running in 1983. Computerworld and PC Week carried it every week. It got quoted in court cases and used to value hardware inside corporate mergers. The Business Radio Network read it out on air as well.

The Index is what outlived the company. A second-hand market needs a reference price before it can function, and until 1983 the used-computer trade did not have one. The Index gave it a number to point at, and the price series it accumulated was long enough to support a ten-year report on how fast popular models lost their value. Randall eventually wrote the whole method down as the Used Computer Handbook, published by Microsoft Press in 1990.

~ seats on the exchange ~

From 1986 the founders also sold the business itself. A book called Seat on the Exchange explained how to run a computer exchange in your own city, with access to a national database on a private server, and it went through several editions. At the peak 150 of them were trading, under names like the Southern Computer Exchange and NaComEx, and the furthest-flung had seats in Santiago and Leningrad.

~ the last tenant of the domain ~

Wikipedia says Randall and Hall sold the Exchange to ValCom, a computer retailer, on 1 January 1990. That date appears only in the article's uncited section, and I could not corroborate the sale anywhere else. What is clear is what followed: the new owner used the Exchange to shift surplus stock out of its own stores and left the online half alone. ValCom, founded in 1982 like the Exchange itself, merged with Inacomp Computer Centers in 1991 and became InaCom. Hall died of cancer in 1998.

The corporate ending sits in a court file under somebody else's name. The petition date is 16 June 2000 and the court was in Delaware. InaCom Corp. is the named filer, and Boston Computer Exchange Corporation sits in the debtor list, wedged between Office Products of Minnesota and PC Technical Services. Judge Peter J. Walsh signed the order confirming the Joint Plan of Liquidation on 23 May 2003 and the court entered it on the 27th, which InaCom's own 8-K calls the Confirmation Date. The plan told the administrator to sell whatever was left and cancel the stock, and said plainly that shareholders should expect nothing.

The domain shows the ending better than the paperwork does. On 26 September 2002 bocoex.com was still answering with its own short page, saying that for more than 20 years BoCoEx had been a leader in computer liquidation. By 26 November the same address was serving the HP Factory Outlet instead, selling refurbished Compaq and HP machines behind a toll-free number. From 6 February 2003 it answered with a redirect and nothing else. The first marketplace for second-hand computers finished as a storefront for a manufacturer's own refurbished stock.

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