Xylogics

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

~ the eulogy ~

Three people who had worked at NASA started a company in Needham, Massachusetts in 1971. Laurence Liebson, Robert Bushkoff and Stephen Rotman wanted to call it Xynetic Systems, found the name taken by a California firm, and settled on Xylogic Systems late that year. The business they were actually in was newspapers. They built computerized typesetting and editing systems, the first one for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the second for the Farmington Daily Times in New Mexico, running on GRI minicomputers with a great deal of custom board work around them to drive the disks and capture the incoming newswire.

By 1974 they had a CRT editing station and could sell a newspaper a system with four computers and more than fifty terminals on it. Then in 1976 one of their own customers, Dymo Graphics Systems, bought the entire newspaper product line and took on most of its original developers. What happened to that business afterward is a small horror story of corporate ownership: Esselte bought Dymo in 1977 because it wanted the label maker, sold the typesetting side to ITEK in 1978 because ITEK wanted the laser technology, and by January 1980 a group of a hundred and fifty engineers and field staff had been reduced to two.

Xylogics kept the other half. The second division had been making disk controllers for DEC machines, and that is what the company became. Its Multibus boards, the 450 for SMD drives and the 451 for ESMD, were how an early Sun or an SGI IRIS got to a hard disk in the 1980s, which means a sizable share of the first generation of engineering workstations had a Xylogics part inside the case that the owner never had reason to think about.

~ the dossier ~

~ before the annex ~

The division that stayed behind in 1976 turned out to be the one that mattered. Disk controllers put Xylogics inside every serious Unix workstation of the decade, and the board-level engineering that came with that work is what made the next product possible.

~ the ports ~

The Annex was a serial terminal server. You could buy one with four ports or with seventy-two, and what it did was sit between a bank of modems and a network and turn one into the other. By the early 1990s that had quietly become one of the load-bearing boxes in commercial internet access, because every dial-up call anybody made had to land on a port on something, and that something had to authenticate the caller and hand them an address.

Nobody who dialed in ever learned the name. My own first modem was a 33.6k on a Turkish line in 1998, and everything I could see of a connection was the handshake and then a number of kilobits. Whatever answered the call was a rack of ports in a building I had no picture of, and the brand on its front panel was not information that traveled down a phone line. The whole category worked like that. It stayed out of sight because it worked, and staying out of sight is why these names could disappear without anyone outside the industry registering it.

~ what bay bought ~

Bay Networks signed the merger agreement on 5 September 1995 and closed on 15 December. It was a pooling of interests: Bay issued 8,710,865 shares of its own stock for all of Xylogics and set aside another 1,655,275 for the Xylogics options it assumed. Bay's own filings put $16.1 million of merger-related expense against the deal in that fiscal year. Xylogics had turned over $50.4 million in fiscal 1994 and $61.3 million in fiscal 1995, and it was losing money by then: the $61.3 million year carried a net loss of $2.0 million.

Bruce Sachs, who had joined Xylogics in May 1989 as a director of engineering and run it as chief executive from August 1993, became an executive vice president at Bay and president of the Xylogics Business Unit. Bay folded the Annex management software into Optivity and kept selling the Nautica remote access line. Nortel bought Bay in June 1998, and when Nortel collapsed in 2009 support for whatever Annex hardware was still racked somewhere ended up with Avaya. The company stopped existing in December 1995. Its boxes were still being handed to a new owner fourteen years later.

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