Genoa Systems

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

~ the last words ~

Genoa Systems Corporation was set up in San Jose in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Ching Fong Investment Company, a Taiwanese holding company with its American office in San Francisco. Frank C. Lin is the co-founder Wikipedia names. The business opened with external tape drives called Galaxy, a reasonable PC trade in 1984.

Graphics cards are what stuck. The Spectrum Graphics Card shipped in the fall of 1985 and Spectrum Plus arrived before that year was out. Spectra EGA came in early 1986. SuperEGA followed late that year and SuperEGA HiRes in 1987, by which point the naming scheme had given up on subtlety. SuperVGA and SuperVGA HighRes landed in late 1987, a family of Super VGA boards with a 70 MHz refresh rate in the fall of 1989, and a Phantom 64 PCI card built on the S3 Vision864 in 1995.

In 1986 the company turned roughly $18 million a year through more than a thousand dealers. Its card business was finished by the time I first dialed up in 1998, and there was never an online half to it anyway: Genoa sold boards into beige boxes through a dealer channel, and the only way to meet the name was to read the silkscreen on a card somebody else had installed.

~ the record ~

~ the vesa table ~

In 1988 Genoa was one of the founding members of the Video Electronics Standards Association, sitting with STB Systems and Video Seven among others, and Wikipedia credits it as instrumental in the development of Super VGA. That is the company's real monument. Every machine that ever reported an SVGA mode is downstream of a committee Genoa helped convene. The firm doing the convening had 65 employees in 1994.

~ the card business ~

Add-in graphics was a brutal trade. The chip came from somebody else, usually Trident or S3, and the card maker's job was to put it on a board and then undercut thirty other companies doing exactly the same thing. Genoa diversified the way everyone did. NovaCom modems went out under its name, and sound arrived with the AudioBlitz Classic in 1994, followed by boards built on Yamaha's OPL3 and OPL4.

What killed the margin was integration. Once the graphics controller moved onto the motherboard chipset, the reason to buy a separate card at the low end evaporated, and only the companies building their own silicon at the high end had a future. Genoa had never built its own silicon. A board house that assembles other people's chips is in business exactly as long as assembling them is worth paying for.

~ the appliance ~

Its answer was the Genoa Embedded Information Appliance, a late-1990s bet on the internet terminal, which was the category every tired hardware company tried in that window. Computer Business Review was writing about the GEIA in March 1998. Wikipedia's verdict on it is three words long: a commercial flop.

The company renamed itself Genoa Electronics Corporation around 1998, the name the archived homepage carries, and moved out of San Jose to Fremont. Both of those are the moves of a firm trying to become something else. Neither worked, and Wikipedia's account ends with the line that by 2002 Genoa had folded completely, sourced to a corporate registry rather than to a news report.

~ fremont ~

The archive gives a tighter ending than the registry does. genoasys.com served its own pages from the first capture in November 1996 through 19 May 2000, under the title Genoa Electronics, and by 1 March 2001 the apex was answering with a redirect instead. Computer Hope puts the company out of business in 1999. So the 2002 on the headstone is a corporate registry catching up with a website that had stopped two years before it, and genoasys.com is an unrelated Australian training company today.

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