Globix

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

~ the obituary ~

The part of Globix i would have cared about existed in 1994, ran only on Macintoshes, and was finished before i had a modem. By the company's own account, Marc Bell built something called GameNet that year, the first multiplayer online service dedicated to Mac games, because he liked games. It is a footnote inside a footnote. It is also the only door into this company that a person like me would ever have walked through, and it was shut by the time i got online in 1998.

What Globix actually became is a hosting and connectivity business in New York with a transatlantic backbone attached. Dedicated access and colocation and the web hosting on top of them, with the systems work around all of it. Its customer list ran to the New York Post and Deutsche Bank and Comedy Central and the Salvation Army, which is to say that everything you would have seen of Globix in 1999 was somebody else's website loading. That is the standard condition of this whole industry and it is why almost none of these companies have a public memory.

The scale it reached is not in doubt. By 2000 it was running more than a million square feet of data center and 28,000 miles of fiber, with facilities in New York and London plus a campus in Santa Clara, and the market valued it above $2.5 billion. Nine years earlier it had been a company that sold Macs to publishers in Manhattan. The 1990s allowed that.

~ the case file ~

~ the argument about 1989 ~

Wikipedia says Globix was founded in 1989 as Bell Technology Group, a value-added computer reseller. The company's own surviving timeline says otherwise. It puts NAFT International Ltd. at 1989, an Apple reseller that grew into the largest publishing VAR in New York City, and does not form Bell Technology Group until 1996, as a holding company over NAFT and three other businesses Bell had accumulated by then.

Both accounts are printed here because the disagreement is not trivial. One version has a single company that changed names twice. The other has a founder assembling four separate small businesses in Manhattan over seven years, one of them a print brokerage and another the Mac gaming service, and only then putting a public shell around the pile. The second version is a much more accurate picture of how internet companies of that generation were actually built, and it is the version the people who were there wrote down.

~ the building ~

In 1998 Globix bought 139 Centre Street and moved out of the Puck Building, adding 160,000 square feet. That was not the expensive one. In september 2000 it bought the land and an eight-story building of roughly 185,000 gross square feet at 415 Greenwich Street in Tribeca, to be its newest New York data center, and it announced the plan at Internet World.

To pay for that and the rest of the buildout, Globix completed a $600 million bond offering. That is the number that killed it. Bonds are a fixed claim on a company whose revenue was about to be a function of how many dot-coms still existed, and by january 2002 the market capitalization had fallen from $2.5 billion to $5.87 million while the debt had not moved at all. It filed Chapter 11 on 14 january 2002 and was delisted from Nasdaq.

The reorganization was confirmed on 8 april 2002 and took effect on the 25th. Bondholders traded $600 million of paper for $120 million of new notes, which is what twenty cents on the dollar looks like when it is written down politely. The Greenwich Street building was sold to fund operations, in october 2003 according to Wikipedia and in january 2004 according to the company's own SEC filing, and nobody has reconciled the two since.

~ the five quiet years ~

What follows is the part nobody writes about, which is a dot-com continuing to trade for half a decade after everyone stopped watching. It bought Aptegrity in november 2003, announced a merger with NEON Communications in july 2004 and closed that in march 2005. Fiscal 2004 came in at a $41.4 million net loss against $95.8 million of debt.

Then it sold the parts. The headquarters went and the UK subsidiary went, and then the hosting business itself, which was the thing the company had actually been. In february 2007 the shell renamed itself NEON Communications Group, Inc., and the word Globix stopped being the name of anything. RCN announced the purchase in june 2007 and closed it in november. neoncommunications.com today is parked on a domain broker with a make-an-offer button.

~ who is still there ~

globix.com resolves. It has not been sold to a squatter and it does not redirect to a successor, and it will not load over https because nobody has renewed a certificate. What it serves is a memorial, written by the people who worked there, with pages for the company history and the old network map, and one page headed Globix Alumni.

The timeline on it runs 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000. Then it stops. There is no entry for the bankruptcy and none for the year the name was retired. The site's own summary of the company ends on the sentence that its impact was significant and its legacy lives on, and then, at the bottom, a form: first name, last name, email, former department at Globix, former title at Globix. Help us reconnect our Globix family members. There is a Facebook group linked next to it.

Every grave in this vein ends with a domain answering nothing, or redirecting to the fourth company that bought the second company. This one ends with the people who spent the best years of their working lives inside those buildings in lower Manhattan, still paying the registrar, still looking for each other.

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