The Wollongong Group

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

~ the eulogy ~

There was a period of about fifteen years when connecting a personal computer to the internet was something you paid a software company to make possible. The protocols were public. Implementations of them, packaged so that a person who was not a systems programmer could install one, were a product with a price on it. Wollongong's PC package brought the cost of getting an ordinary user online down to under $3,000 of equipment, which contemporary accounts put at roughly a tenth of what any other route cost.

The name is the strangest thing about the company and the most honest. It was founded in Palo Alto in 1980 to commercialize a port of Unix Version 6 that researchers at the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, had written. The founders took the university's name and kept it for the whole life of the company, which means a generation of American network engineers learned to pronounce an Australian coastal town because of a software license.

Nearly everything it sold began as public domain code out of a university and was turned into something with documentation and a support line. Eunice, a Unix environment for VAX VMS, came from David Kashtan's work at SRI. The TCP/IP packages for VMS and for AT&T Unix Version 7 came from Berkeley. The IBM PC product came from John Romkey's PC-IP at MIT. The work Wollongong added was not the protocol. It was making the protocol something a purchasing department could buy.

My own first connection came in 1998, two years after this company stopped existing and exactly late enough to have missed the entire premise of it. Windows by then shipped a TCP/IP stack in the box, and configuring it meant opening a Control Panel and typing in a number the ISP had read out over the phone. The hardest part was the busy signal. I had no idea that the quiet part, the part that simply worked, had once been somebody's product line.

~ the dossier ~

~ the stack ~

Wollongong's customers were not hobbyists. Individual licensing deals went to Philips for its P9000 Unix line and to Cray Research, and the flagship late product was Emissary, a gateway that let thousands of TCP/IP users reach an SNA mainframe. That is the shape the company kept to the end: it stood between a network that was becoming universal and a corporate computer that was not going anywhere.

There was a second bet that did not pay. Through the late eighties and into the nineties, Wollongong built a commercial version of the ISODE suite, implementing the OSI protocols that most governments and standards bodies had declared the future. X.400 for mail, X.500 for directory. The mail product was to be called the Pathway Messaging System. The project was canceled in August 1994, by which point the commercial argument for OSI had largely collapsed.

~ the rfcs ~

The people were the real output. Wollongong staff wrote RFC 1066, the first SNMP MIB, and RFC 1088, an early specification for carrying IP traffic across a network that was not built for it. Marshall Rose did SNMP and ISODE work there. David H. Crocker was there, and Karl Auerbach, and Leo McLaughlin and John Bartas on the PC side. Epilogue Technologies, InterNiche, Taos Mountain Software and iPass were all started by people who left.

Very little of this is visible now because the output was specifications rather than products, and a specification gets absorbed into equipment instead of being sold under a name. Every network device that answers an SNMP query is doing something whose first machine-readable description was written by this company's employees.

~ the exit ~

Attachmate announced the purchase on 29 November 1995, and the Seattle Times reported it with a figure worth preserving, because Wikipedia prints a different one. The Times put Wollongong at $27 million in annual sales and 165 employees. The widely repeated figure of $40 million is not in the source that claim cites. Attachmate at that point was Washington state's second-largest software company after Microsoft, at $390 million in sales.

The deal closed in January 1996, and by March a trade report was describing Wollongong as Attachmate's Intranet Products Group. The name lasted about one quarter past the sale. twg.com does not resolve now, which is a quiet ending for a company whose employees wrote part of the specification that makes resolving a name possible.

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