Proteon

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

~ the obituary ~

Howard Salwen started Proteon in 1972 as a communications consulting firm, which is the least interesting thing about it. The company turned into a manufacturer when it built the first commercial Token Ring products in partnership with MIT, and in 1981 it shipped Pronet-10, a 10 Mbit/sec ring that worked three years before IBM announced a competing one. Proteon kept pushing the speed up, eventually to 100 Mbit/sec. For most of the 1980s, if you wanted a ring faster than IBM's ring, you bought it from a company in Massachusetts that very few people outside the industry could name.

In 1986 Proteon shipped the p4200, the first commercially available multiprotocol router, built on the multiprotocol router work done at MIT using code written by Noel Chiappa. That put Proteon in a very small group of companies selling the boxes the growing Internet actually ran on, next to Cisco and Wellfleet. It went public in 1991 on an offering of 3.1 million shares.

1992 was the top: $120.3 million in net sales. Then a slide that never stopped. By 1996 the figure was $45.3 million against a net loss of $12.0 million, and every year in between had pointed the same direction. Ethernet got cheap and then got switched, and the market for a premium ring evaporated underneath a company that had built its manufacturing line around one. At the end of 1997 Proteon employed 127 people, 13 of them in manufacturing.

I was fourteen in June 1998, dialing up from Turkey at 14.4k, and no home user anywhere was ever a Proteon customer. The company sold to corporations and to universities, one layer above where a consumer account terminates. The part of Proteon that did reach me was a routing protocol with no logo on it.

~ the case file ~

~ the protocol that outlived the letterhead ~

John Moy worked at Proteon, and the OSPF specification has his name on it. RFC 1247, July 1991, OSPF Version 2, author line "J. Moy, Proteon, Inc." RFC 1583, March 1994, same title and same affiliation, this time on the standards track. Open Shortest Path First became the interior routing protocol that large networks default to, and through the 1990s the document defining it carried a Westborough company's name in the header block.

By April 1998 the definitive version shipped as RFC 2328, STD 54, and the affiliation line read Ascend Communications. Two months later the company he had written it at changed its name too. Neither change affected the protocol.

~ the vote ~

The restructuring had a tell in it. Proteon's 1996 results carried a charge "to accomplish the restructuring of our business, and the formation of OpenROUTE Networks, Inc." The new name existed as a subsidiary two years before the parent took it, so somebody had already decided where this was going and was waiting for the rest of the company to catch up.

On 10 June 1998 the shareholders approved an amendment to the Restated Articles of Organization changing the registrant's name from Proteon, Inc. to OpenROUTE Networks, Inc. The 8-K filed six days later runs two paragraphs and is signed by Daniel J. Capone, Jr., who was replaced as chief executive on 7 July. OpenROUTE merged into Netrix in 1999 and the combination was rebranded NX Networks. NSGDatacom picked up what was left in 2002.

~ what the domain says now ~

proteon.com redirects to firelay.com, a Dutch consultancy that works on Liferay. The word "proteon" appears zero times on the page. openroute.com survives in better shape and serves NSGDatacom, the last company in the chain, with no mention of either name it inherited.

The filings are the real headstone. A company selling $120 million a year of the hardware the early Internet ran on spent its last full year with 127 employees and 507 holders of record, then asked those holders to vote the name off the paperwork. They did, and the only place it is still printed in the present tense is an RFC from 1991.

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