FTP Software

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

~ the goodbye ~

FTP Software was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986 by James van Bokkelen, John Romkey, Nancy Connor, Roxanne van Bokkelen and Dave Bridgham, several of whom had done the original work on getting TCP/IP running on a personal computer at MIT. Romkey is the same person who later put a toaster on the internet as a joke that people are still repeating. The company was named after a protocol, which tells you how early it was.

The product was PC/TCP, a complete standards-compliant TCP/IP implementation for DOS. The technical claim that mattered was multiple simultaneous connections, seven of them on a 128KB IBM PC-XT, on an operating system with no concept of doing two things at once and no memory to spare for pretending otherwise. Fitting a working network stack into that machine was genuine engineering and customers paid genuine money for it.

It went public in 1994 into a market that had just worked out what the internet was, and at one point carried a valuation over $1 billion. It stayed profitable through 1995 as the leading supplier of TCP stacks for x86 machines. Then the revenue went, and in 1998 NetManage acquired the company in a stock deal valued around $77.5 million, reported in the UK press as £46.7 million.

I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem, and installing a TCP/IP stack was never something I had to know existed. You put in the number and the modem screamed. Windows already had the networking part. That was the whole business model of this company, sitting there switched on and free, and my complete unawareness of it is a fair description of why FTP Software stopped existing the same year I started.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

For most of the DOS era the internet protocols were not part of the computer. Networking was something you bought and installed, on floppies, with a manual explaining IRQ settings. Universities and large firms bought PC/TCP by the hundreds of seats so their PCs could reach the Unix machines that had the actual internet connection, and the license revenue on that was substantial and recurring.

The competition tells you the shape of the market. Trumpet Winsock was the shareware answer for home users and became the way an enormous number of people first reached the web, and Spry sold Internet in a Box to consumers through retail. FTP Software had the corporate end, where standards compliance and support contracts mattered more than price and where the buyer was an IT department rather than a person.

~ the day the floor went ~

Windows 95 included TCP/IP. Not as a product, not as an upsell, just present in the operating system every new PC arrived with. Microsoft was not attacking FTP Software specifically. It had decided networking was a feature of an operating system rather than an application, which is obviously correct and which retroactively deleted the reason for an entire software category.

The company had time to see it coming and did not convert. The plan was to move up into network applications and management tools, above the layer that had just become free, and it did not work fast enough or well enough against competitors who had started there. Profitable in 1995, sold in 1998. The detail that stuck to the story is that shareholders complained the sale price was less than the cash FTP Software was holding, meaning the market valued the ongoing business at less than nothing.

~ what remains ~

There is no surviving product to point at, and that is the correct outcome rather than a tragedy. The work these people did at MIT and then commercially, making the protocols run on cheap hardware normal people owned, is the reason the stack became ordinary infrastructure. A technology that succeeds completely becomes invisible, and the companies that sold it while it was still visible do not usually get to stay.

NetManage kept some of the technology going in host-connectivity products and was itself bought by Micro Focus in 2008. The clearer memorial is the one nobody notices: every device that joins a network without being asked how, which in 1990 was a several hundred dollar purchase and a bad afternoon.

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