LANtastic

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

~ the obit ~

by the time i would have wanted a lan at home, lantastic was already a memory. in '98 the home network was a single 33.6k modem plugged into the back of one machine in the living room. if there was a second pc in the house, you sneaker-netted floppies between them. small offices were where lantastic actually lived, and in turkey those were running on windows for workgroups or windows 95 by the time i was old enough to look inside one.

artisoft incorporated in tucson arizona in 1982 with forty thousand dollars from c. john schoof. lantastic shipped in 1987, the first peer to peer pc network with a real consumer story. by 1990 there were over 200,000 adapters out in the field, mostly in dental offices and accountancy practices and law firms with fewer than twenty-five people. the pitch was simple, you could share a printer and a file directory between three pcs without buying a server.

windows for workgroups in 1993 was the first cut. windows 95 in 1995 made every pc on the network into a peer by default with the networking right there in the control panel. artisoft kept shipping lantastic through the late 90s for the install base that was still running dos or windows 3.1, but the addressable market was shrinking every quarter. by 2000 the company sold the entire lantastic product line to spartacom technologies and pivoted to voice over ip with the televantage line. the brand was effectively retired even if the maintenance updates continued under pc micro through 2006.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the trick was the price point. novell netware in 1987 wanted a dedicated server, a netware license per workstation, and a consultant to install it. honestly, lantastic asked for one network card per pc and a copy of the software per node. you ran it on top of dos with no separate machine acting as the central server. anyone in the office who knew how to copy files could be the admin. small businesses adopted it because the alternative was paying novell prices for a four-machine office.

artisoft also wrote its own twisted-pair adapter that ran at 2 mbit per second when 10base-t was not yet the universal standard. that adapter sold cheaper than a 3com or western digital ethernet card and worked out of the box with lantastic. for a few years the artisoft adapter plus the lantastic software was the cheapest way to put two or three pcs on a wire and call it a network.

~ the cracks ~

microsoft's windows for workgroups 3.11 in '93 packaged smb file sharing inside the operating system. you no longer had to buy lantastic to share a folder between two windows boxes. windows 95 a year and a half later put networking into the install wizard. by the mid 90s the only customers buying new lantastic licenses were sites that had standardized on dos and could not move yet.

artisoft tried to follow the market. lantastic for windows shipped, lantastic for os/2 shipped, the company picked up stylus innovation in 1996 for the computer-telephony business. none of it had the install base of the original dos product. the company was reading the same writing on the wall as quarterdeck and central point software at the same time, and the answer ended up the same. sell off the legacy line and pivot to something the bundled microsoft stack had not killed yet.

~ what got buried with it ~

the small office network as a discrete purchase decision. in 1989 you sat down with a vendor and chose between novell, lantastic, banyan vines, and a few others, and the choice mattered for years. by 1996 the decision was made for you the moment you bought a windows pc. the category collapsed into the operating system and most of the names did not survive the transition. lantastic was the one that lasted longest as a brand, because the small offices it served had the slowest hardware refresh and kept renewing maintenance long after the larger market had moved on.

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