NABU Network

~ the last words ~

My first modem, in 1998, ran at 14.4 kilobits a second. A house in Ottawa was pulling 6.4 megabits off its television cable in 1983, which is something like four hundred and fifty times faster, fifteen years earlier. That number is the entire reason NABU is worth a grave.

NABU stood for Natural Access to Bi-directional Utilities, which is a name written by people who were sure the second half was coming. The company floated on the Toronto Stock Exchange in December 1982 and raised twenty-six million dollars on the idea. The service went live on Ottawa Cablevision in October 1983, on a network with something like eighty-five thousand homes already wired for television.

The mechanism was a broadcast carousel rather than a request. NABU's computers pushed the whole software library down a spare television channel over and over, and the adapter box in your house waited for the piece you had asked for to come around again. Nothing you did traveled back up the cable, because the cable physically could not carry it. What looked like a network was a very fast radio station with a catalog.

~ the record ~

~ the catch ~

You could not bring your own machine. The NABU Personal Computer was a Z80 box that cost nine hundred and fifty dollars, or you rented it for nineteen ninety-five a month with another ten on top for the software service. A cable company selling television was now also asking households to buy a computer they had never heard of, from a manufacturer with no other product, in order to receive a service that only existed on that one cable system.

Late on there were adapters so a Commodore or another home machine could reach the network instead. By then the argument had already been lost. The lock-in had cost NABU the first year, which was the only year it had.

~ the numbers ~

The plan was five percent of Ottawa Cablevision's subscriber base within six months. By the end of 1984 there were around fifteen hundred subscribers in the Ottawa region and seven hundred more in a trial around Alexandria, Virginia. When the company finally produced financial statements dated September 1984 they showed four million dollars in assets against thirty million in liabilities.

Campeau Corporation had put more than twenty-five million into it and was both the largest shareholder and the largest creditor. In November 1984 Campeau declined to fund it any further and NABU stopped. Trading in the shares was suspended and the Toronto Stock Exchange delisted the company in January 1985, with a residue of service limping on in Ottawa for a while after the company that ran it was already dead.

~ what replaced it ~

The shape NABU picked came back and won. A fat channel running down to the house with a thin one going back up is what ADSL is, and it is what I finally got from TTNet around 2006 after eight years of modems. NABU had the downstream working in 1983 and no upstream at all, so it had to fake the return path or do without one. The lopsided pipe was the correct guess. Selling a proprietary computer through a cable company to prove it was not.

There is a small and genuinely strange afterlife. In 2022 a stack of unsold NABU computers surfaced and got into the hands of retrocomputing people, who put the machines back on a network over the internet instead of coaxial. There is a working CP/M service running on hardware that was manufactured for a business which folded before most of the boxes were ever opened.

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