Xyplex

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

~ the obituary ~

In 1998, the year I got a modem of my own, Xyplex had already been sold three times, the last of those that January. None of that was visible from a bedroom in Turkey, and it was barely visible from an office in Boston either. Xyplex made the box that sat between a wall of serial cables and a network. It started in Massachusetts around 1981, although the oldest hard record of it is a trademark application filed from Concord on 18 June 1984.

The money tells the story faster than the products do. Xyplex reported revenue of $107,617,000 for calendar 1995 and a net loss of $37,360,000 against it, figures that survive only because MRV Communications later had to print them in an SEC filing. That was the best year anyone disclosed. For the fiscal year ending in October 1997 the revenue was $75,663,000 and the loss was $80,309,000, so the company lost more money than it took in. Across every period ever made public it never once turned a profit.

The ending has no date because nobody gave it one. MRV bought the company on 30 January 1998 and renamed the holding entity NBase Xyplex the same day. The Massachusetts operation was rebadged again around 2000 as iTouch Communications. MRV's annual report for 2001, filed in March 2002, still described "NBase-Xyplex, a division of MRV" selling products. The report for 2002 mentions the word twice, once in a risk factor about a 1998 acquisition and once in an exhibit list for a lease signed in 1993. In July 2002 the trademark on its flagship hub lapsed because nobody filed the paperwork to say it was still in use.

~ the case file ~

~ the serial era ~

A terminal server solved a problem that has completely stopped existing. In an office full of text terminals, each one had a serial cable, and running every cable back to a machine room was absurd. The terminal server was a small box with a stack of serial ports on one side and a single network connection on the other, so the terminals talked to it and it talked to everything else. Xyplex was one of the early vendors doing this for Digital Equipment shops, and its boxes spoke LAT, the protocol DEC used for exactly this job before anyone treated TCP/IP as the obvious answer.

The product line that carried the name was the MAXserver, stackable units offering between 8 and 40 ports, scaling to 280 ports inside the modular chassis. The same box that concentrated terminals also concentrated modems, which is how the line found a second life in the dial-up years: an internet provider with 200 subscriber lines needed something to answer them. By the mid-1990s the catalog had grown into the Network 9000, a hub with up to 8.4 Gbit/s of internal bandwidth that would carry Ethernet and Token Ring in the same chassis. Whittaker's annual report for 1996 counted installations in more than 1,000 major hospitals, and about a third of sales came from outside the United States.

~ the defense detour ~

Raytheon's quarterly filing from the autumn of 1994 explains the first sale in its own words: the purchase was "an important step in Raytheon's growth strategy to expand its existing communication business and gives it a strategic entry into the fast growing data communications industry." Three months later Raytheon folded Xyplex into a newly formed Electronic Systems Division, together with Missile Systems. The Patriot Air Defense System was the largest program in that division. In the same quarter Raytheon also bought a manufacturer of commercial frontload washers, which gives a fair sense of how corporate strategy was being written in 1994.

Raytheon sold it on at a loss fourteen months later. Whittaker Corporation, another defense contractor convinced that networking was its future, signed on 2 March 1996 and closed on 9 April for $117.5 million. Within a year it had hired an advisor to sell the thing again, cut the amortization period on the goodwill to seven years, and taken impairment charges against it twice. Whittaker's 1997 annual report moves the whole communications segment into discontinued operations and explains that "the decision to discontinue the Communications segment followed the Company's evaluation of its core strengths in the aerospace industry." Two defense companies made the identical mistake in sequence, two years apart, and the second one had watched the first one make it.

The residue is small and oddly touching. xyplex.com served pages until August 2016 and has been a dead name since 2018. The trademark went formally inactive on 1 April 2006. xyplex.net today belongs to a hobbyist who writes about old hardware and keeps a page of scanned MAXserver manuals, which means the last working thing with the name on it is somebody's archive of instructions for a box nobody owns.

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