Timbuktu

~ the goodbye ~

Remote control software reached me as a Windows thing, and late. Timbuktu was Macintosh software first and stayed Macintosh-shaped for most of its life, which in Turkey meant two walls rather than one: the machines were rare and what they cost was worse. This one I missed on platform.

WOS Data Systems wrote it for the Mac in the late 1980s. Nobody who has written about it since has pinned down a first ship date more precisely than that, which is its own small fact about how quietly it started. Farallon Computing bought WOS in July 1988, and from that point on Timbuktu was the most famous thing Farallon sold without ever having been Farallon's idea.

What it did was open a window onto another machine's screen and let you work in it. You could watch without touching or take the keyboard and mouse outright. You could drop a file onto somebody's icon and it landed on their disk. In 1988 hardly anyone had watched a computer do that, and it ran over AppleTalk on a local network, which in practice meant over the telephone wiring Farallon was already selling for the purpose.

~ the chronicle ~

~ before anyone said screen sharing ~

The vocabulary had not been invented. Screen sharing as a phrase belongs to the 2000s, and in 1988 the thing it describes was a specialist network utility a Macintosh administrator bought so they would not have to walk to the other building. Timbuktu was among the first graphical programs anywhere to do it, and on the Mac it went years without a serious competitor.

Timbuktu Pro in 1993 added TCP/IP and quietly changed what the product was for. A tool built on the assumption of a local network now worked across the internet, and the Windows version that followed meant a Mac could drive a PC and a PC could drive a Mac. That cross-platform trick is why mixed offices kept paying for it deep into the 2000s, long after free alternatives were sitting on every download site.

~ four companies owned it ~

Farallon renamed itself Netopia in 1999 to match the DSL router business that by then paid for everything. Motorola bought Netopia in February 2007 for about $208 million because it wanted routers and set-top software. Timbuktu came along in the box. Motorola's home division was sold on to Arris in 2013, and Timbuktu came along again.

Every one of those buyers had a reason to want the company and none of them had a reason to want the program. It shipped anyway, version 8.8.5 on the Mac and 9.0.5 on Windows, both dated October 2013. Nothing was released after those.

~ the email that ended it ~

On 28 April 2015 Arris told customers development was finished and sales would close in ninety days. Support was promised for five more years after that, which is a decent way to do it. The last word on a piece of Macintosh network software from 1988 came from a cable equipment manufacturer, sent to a list of customers nobody had looked at closely in about a decade.

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