Ungermann-Bass - the first company that only did networks - Ralph Ungermann left Zilog to build networks and nothing else, which nobody had done as a business before.

Founded in 1979, Ungermann-Bass is usually described as the first company whose entire business was computer networking rather than computers that happened to network. That is a real distinction: until then, networking was a feature sold by whoever made the machines, and a customer's options were bounded by their computer vendor.

Ungermann-Bass was incorporated in July 1979 in Santa Clara by Ralph Ungermann and Charlie Bass, both out of Zilog. Ungermann had managed the 8080 project at Intel and left in 1974 with Federico Faggin to found Zilog; when Exxon's investment brought pressure he clashed with its management and was pushed out at the end of 1978. Bass, who had a doctorate and had taught at Berkeley and Stanford, joined him. They recruited Judith Estrin and John Davidson - Davidson being one of the creators of NCP, the transport protocol the ARPANET used before TCP.

One detail from the funding is worth more than the amount raised. The venture capitalists would not close the round on the strength of that engineering team alone; they agreed to invest only once a seasoned sales executive, Jim Jordan, joined from Four-Phase Systems. A company assembled from some of the best network engineers available still had to hire a salesman before anyone would fund it.

The technical decision that defined it was taken against the alternative. Bass investigated broadband and rejected it, building consensus for Ethernet instead - the mirror image of the choice Sytek made in the same city in the same year, and both were deliberate. The first product, the NIU-1, connected eight to thirty-two terminals to host computers over Ethernet using XNS. UB became the first large networking company independent of any computer manufacturer, which was the whole proposition: at the time network equipment came from the computer maker and spoke only that maker's protocols.

What eventually undid it was a different standards bet. UB backed OSI, the officially sanctioned protocol suite that committees and governments had agreed on, while TCP/IP - unsanctioned, already running, and free - took the market. Backing the official standard against the working one is a recognisable failure mode, and it is one that looks prudent at the time and only becomes an error in retrospect.

Tandem Computers acquired it in 1988 for about 260 million dollars, having rejected a lower offer from a rival bidder, and the estate it brought included networking forty thousand devices across General Motors plants. Tandem later sold the unit to Newbridge Networks, and the company was liquidated in 1997. Of the three that started Silicon Valley networking in 1979, none survived as an independent company - which says less about their engineering than about how completely the market they created was reorganised around a single vendor.

Ungermann-Bass ↗

Sources