We - as manufacturers of HIPPI NICs and crossbar switches - we were technically just supplying OEM parts to a Canadian company. They were the people trying to sell a giant turn-key censorship solution to the Malaysian government. I believe we were simply trying to "help our biggest customer" with an IBM-style field service tech.

Also, this was a rush fix. Flying me on the next flight was supposedly faster than the usual shipping/courier services? At least that's what the boss believed? I never got the full explanation, but I suspect that the Canadian company was ~30-50 hours away from losing the entire deal, which was supposed to be our main (only?) source of revenue until we could ship an important new product[4] a few months later. With the benefit of hindsight, instead of a rational, sound plan, the whole situation smells more like a panic about losing VC funding.

[4] We had re-purposed 8 & 16 port crossbar switches where each port could be (mix-n-match): HIPPI, FC, ATM, 2xFDDI, 2xSCSI3 (!), 1000BASE-T, or 8x(100BASE-TX/FX) with arbitrary layer-3 routing and arbitrary tunneling. Two switches with SCSI and ATM ports did something similar to FCoE/iSCSI... in 1996. RAID 1 over 10km of fiber was awesome. Except it never shipped, because everyone was focused on our broken NIC. --sigh--