The Voyager Company

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

~ the goodbye ~

voyager's entire run fits inside my childhood. it opened the year i was born and closed the year before i got a modem, and it sold objects that cost fifty or sixty dollars in american shops and were never distributed anywhere near me. the cd-rom that reached turkey in the nineties was a different kind of object entirely, a copied disc with a hand-written label and no packaging.

bob stein and aleen stein started it in santa monica in 1984, with jonathan turell and bill becker. the premise was that print was ending and something would come after it, and that the job worth doing was working out what. the original logo was a book turning into a disc, which is about as direct a mission statement as a company ever draws.

the first business was laserdiscs, published with janus films under a label called the criterion collection. this is where a large amount of what people now assume about home video was invented. from 1986 voyager made it company policy to release films only in their original aspect ratio, at a time when almost every home release was cropped to fit a television. the commentary track and the supplementary disc both come out of the same room.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it made ~

from 1989 the same approach went onto cd-rom, starting with a guide to beethoven's ninth symphony that let you follow the score while the recording played. what followed over the next eight years is a catalog with almost nothing in common with the rest of the cd-rom market, which by then was mostly encyclopedias and dinosaurs. voyager published art spiegelman's maus with the source interviews and the sketchbooks attached, and a macbeth you could read against a filmed performance. laurie anderson's puppet motel was on the same list and was less a reference work than a place to wander around in.

expanded books arrived in 1992 and is the one that reads strangest now. the idea was a whole book on a floppy, formatted for the powerbook screen, with a search box and a bookmark that remembered where you were. they did william gibson and douglas adams among others. this is 1992, on a machine with a grayscale display, and it is recognizably the thing a kindle would be fifteen years later.

~ what really happened ~

the cd-rom market that voyager helped invent did not survive contact with the web. by 1996 the money that had funded interactive titles was going into websites instead, and the retail shelf space for cd-roms was collapsing under a company whose whole output was expensive slow-made discs. stein's own account of the end is not about the market though. it is about the ownership: a complicated partnership where five people held pieces and could not agree on what to do next.

so it was taken apart in 1997 rather than sold. the holtzbrinck group left with its twenty percent and took the voyager name along with half the cd-rom rights. stein kept the other half and sold forty-two titles to a company called learn technologies interactive, which is where the catalog went to be quiet. criterion was left with the three remaining original partners holding a third each.

~ what replaced it ~

the piece that lived is criterion, which by any measure won: it is now the label people mean when they say a film has been treated properly, and every convention it established on laserdisc in the eighties is standard. the piece that died is the software, and it died completely. the discs need an operating system nobody runs, and most of the titles have never been legally reissued in any form.

voyager.com does not resolve. there is an active preservation effort around the catalog because the alternative is that a decade of the most ambitious work anyone did in the format exists only on discs rotting in american basements. stein went on to spend the next thirty years on the same question he started with, which is what reading turns into when the page stops being paper.

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