Connectix

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

~ the obit ~

Connectix was formed in October 1988 by Jon Garber, with Bonnie Fought and Roy McDonald as the other two people who mattered on the board. McDonald was chief executive for most of the company's life and was still holding the title when it closed. The business it fell into was a specific and slightly cursed one: find something the Macintosh should be able to do and cannot, and sell the fix as a utility until Apple builds that capability into the operating system and makes you obsolete.

That happened over and over. Virtual gave the Mac virtual memory years before System 7 shipped with any of its own. MODE32 let 32-bit dirty Macs address more than eight megabytes of RAM, and Apple ended up buying that one outright and giving it away free, partly to settle a class action from customers who wanted to know why their hardware could not reach its own memory. Each product was a real fix for a real defect, and each one had a fuse on it lit by the platform vendor.

So the second half of the company's life was spent building things that were too good to be absorbed and selling them to whoever was threatened by them. QuickCam went to Logitech in August 1998 for $25 million. The Virtual Game Station went to Sony in 2001, after Sony had spent two years in court trying to stop it. Virtual PC went to Microsoft in a transaction completed on 18 February 2003, taking chief technical officer Eric Traut and the engineering staff along with it but leaving the board and the support team behind. By August 2003 the Macintosh products had been discontinued and there was no company left underneath them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ doubling things ~

RAM Doubler shipped in 1994 and was the first product to put compression underneath virtual memory, which meant a Mac with eight megabytes behaved like a Mac with sixteen without anybody opening the case. It sold enormously for years. Memory was expensive and the alternative was a trip to a dealer, so a piece of software that appeared to conjure hardware out of nothing was an easy sell to anyone who had priced a SIMM.

Speed Doubler was the stranger achievement. It contained a dynamically recompiling 68K-to-PowerPC emulator that ran old Macintosh software faster than the emulator Apple shipped inside its own operating system, and faster than the one Apple shipped later to replace that. A small company in San Mateo wrote a better translation layer for Apple's processor transition than Apple did. That expertise is what all of the later products were actually made of.

~ the emulator case ~

The Virtual Game Station let a Macintosh run PlayStation discs. To build it Connectix had reverse-engineered Sony's BIOS, which required making copies of the copyrighted firmware during development, and Sony sued to have the product banned. The district court granted an injunction and took the product off sale. On 10 February 2000 the Ninth Circuit reversed it.

The ruling held that intermediate copying during reverse engineering is fair use when the goal is to reach the unprotected functional ideas underneath, and that Sony's trademark had not been tarnished by someone selling an emulator. It is one of the load-bearing decisions in American software law, and every clean-room emulator project since has stood on it, including the console emulators people still argue about today.

Sony lost the case and then bought the product anyway in 2001, and dropped it immediately. Buying a thing in order to stop it is a perfectly legal outcome that no court decision can reach, and it is how the losing party ended up with what it originally wanted. Bleem, which did the same job for Windows and fought the same battles, was bankrupted by legal costs a year later despite winning its own cases.

~ the parts that got sold ~

The Virtual PC code did not stop when Connectix did. Microsoft shipped it as Microsoft Virtual PC and as Virtual Server, and the virtualization group that came with the sale fed into what eventually became Hyper-V, which is still the hypervisor underneath a large amount of Windows server infrastructure and the reason a modern Windows laptop can run a Linux kernel without a second machine. Eric Traut went on to run core Windows work at Microsoft for years. I spend a lot of my working life inside virtual machines and containers and had no idea for a very long time that the lineage of one of the common ones ran back to a Mac utility company that also invented the webcam.

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