Spider Systems

» see spider.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ICL ran a Scottish Development Centre out of Dalkeith Palace, just outside Edinburgh, and in 1983 it shut the place down. Several of the engineers who had worked there did not leave Scotland. They started Spider Systems in Edinburgh the same year, and spent the next twelve years building networking equipment in a city that was not on anyone's list of networking cities.

Spider sold the unglamorous middle of a network, the terminal servers and bridges that sat between a corporate site and whatever line it leased. The product range ran to protocol analyzers and wide-area routers, and it leaned on ISDN and X.25 rather than on anything a consumer would have heard of. Its fiscal year ended in March and its revenue was strongly seasonal. In the quarter to 31 March 1995 it took $12.6 million with $1.35 million of operating income, which is a real business run by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

The other half of Spider was software. It wrote network protocol stacks and licensed them to whoever needed one, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s was most of the computer industry, because writing a TCP/IP implementation from scratch was a serious project and buying one was not. That business is the reason the company is remembered at all outside Scotland.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the stack inside Windows ~

Windows NT 3.1 shipped in 1993 with TCP/IP support built on the AT&T System V STREAMS interface, and the code underneath it came from Spider. Microsoft threw the whole thing out for NT 3.5 and replaced it with an implementation written in-house, which is why the Spider lineage is argued about by people who were there: some say the later stack inherited visible traces in the command line tools, others say it was a clean rewrite. Both camps agree about NT 3.1.

That is the only Spider product that ever touched a machine I owned, and it had been replaced before I owned one. I got online in 1998, five years and several NT releases after the one with Edinburgh code in it. A networking company with no consumer product reached more desktops through one OEM license than it ever did through its own sales force.

~ the acquisition ~

On 22 August 1995 Shiva Corporation acquired Spider Systems Limited, "a leading digital internetworking company based in Edinburgh, United Kingdom", in exchange for roughly 3,923,606 shares of Shiva common stock. No cash changed hands. It was a pooling of interests, so Shiva's accountants went back and restated years of published history as though the two companies had always been one.

Shiva booked about $14.0 million of charges in the quarter the deal closed, for combining operations and paying the fees. Spider became Shiva Europe Ltd. Intel bought Shiva in 1998, and Shiva Europe was liquidated the following year.

~ the name that came back, briefly ~

In 1996 one of the founders bought the network software division back out of Shiva and called it Spider Software Ltd, an unusual case of a swallowed company's name being retrieved by the person who chose it in the first place. Artesyn Technologies bought that in 2000 and Emerson Electric ended up with it. On 9 October 2008 Emerson started closing the site, and the office finally shut at the end of October 2009.

So the brand got twenty-six years rather than twelve, in two unequal pieces. spider.co.uk is now a for-sale page. The company that put a stack in Windows is memorialized by a domain broker.

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