InterCon Systems Corporation (a

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...

Corporation) was founded in April 1988 by Kurt D. Baumann and Mikki Barry to produce software to connect

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

computers in environments that were not Macintosh-exclusive. At the time, there was no real concept of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and there was still a question of whether the

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

protocols or OSI protocols would be adopted widely. Over the next 9 years, the company grew from three employees to over 100 and sold software in the US,

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

and

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. In June 1995, InterCon was acquired by

PSINet PSINet, based in Northern Virginia, was one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) and was involved in the commercialization of the Internet until the company's bankruptcy in 2001 during the dot-com bubble and acquisition by Coge ...

and continued to sell and maintain its suite of TCP/IP software. In February 1996, PSINet merged InterCon with Software Ventures (another Macintosh communication software company). In February 1997, InterCon's engineering group and its products were sold to

Ascend Communications Ascend Communications was an Alameda, California-based manufacturer of communications equipment that was later purchased by Lucent Technologies in 1999. Ascend Communications was founded in 1988 and taken public in 1994. Initial investors includ ...

Products

In 1988, InterCon was pursuing two product lines, TCP/Connect (based originally on NCSA Telnet), and an email product. Unfortunately, the licensing for the email product fell through in negotiations, so it was never sold, and InterCon would have to wait a few more years (until TCP/Connect II) before it could provide email to customers.

TCP/Connect

TCP/Connect was InterCon's flagship product. Launched at Macworld Conference & Expo in August 1988, the product provided the same features as NCSA Telnet, with commercial technical support as its only significant added benefit. This was to change rapidly over the next few months, and by October of that year, InterCon was showing the product at the first InterOp Expo with new features including a graphical FTP Client (one of the first on the Macintosh) and IBM 3270 emulation. Over the next few years, InterCon added more terminal emulation and file transfer capabilities to the product, but no other major protocols until the product was replaced with a significant rewrite: TCP/Connect II.

TCP/Connect II

TCP/Connect II was to remain InterCon's

flagship A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the fi ...

product from 1990 until 1995. Although TCP/Connect was primarily a terminal emulation and file transfer program, TCP/Connect II branched out into a full-fledged internet suite. At introduction, it featured email and network news reader support along with additional terminal emulations in addition to the already-popular IBM 3270, and DEC VT-240 emulations. Over the next 5 years, the product evolved quickly and kept or set the pace for many advanced features, including embedded graphics and multimedia content in email; advanced email automation, filtering, and highlighting; a high-speed web browser; a gopher client; and many minor features and protocols. After the introduction of InterCon's web browser in TCP/Connect II,

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

licensed the browser in 1995 for use with their dial-up networking services. In order to separate the browser from the rest of the suite, it was dubbed WebShark.

tcpCONNECT4

tcpCONNECT4 (renamed from TCP/Connect II and with additional features) was a "do-everything suite of TCP/IP applications for Internet or intranet use" that was released in 1996 and had few changes before the company's sale to Ascend Communications.

NFS/Share

NFS/Share was InterCon's second most popular product and provided high-performance access to file servers using the NFS protocol. NFS was used widely in educational environments because it was the key file sharing system for

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

's line of

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

servers. NFS/Share's adoption mirrored that popularity, finding a home in many educational institutions and pre-press environments. NFS/Share used many techniques to increase performance and provide a smooth experience for users, as such providing some of the best performance in the marketplace.

Shark Series

In 1995, InterCon decided to more directly approach the consumer market with a series of "Shark" branded products; NetShark, WebShark, and MailShark. The products were directly derived from the source code for TCP/Connect II (or 4 at the time) and was missing the Terminal Emulation technology.

NetShark

NetShark (and the derivative MailShark) was an internet suite product based on TCP/Connect but including only email and web clients. The slimmed-down version was aimed at consumers, but never really became a popular offering.

MailShark

MailShark was created but never sold. It contained only the email portions of TCP/Connect.

WebShark

WebShark contained only the web browser portion of TCP/Connect. WebShark was licensed by

for use with their Macintosh clients to provide access to the web. A rebranded WebShark similarly shipped as Apple's

eWorld eWorld was an online service operated by Apple Inc. between June 1994 and March 1996. The services included email (eMail Center), news, software installs and a bulletin board system (Community Center). Users of eWorld were often referred to as ...

Web Browser.

InterPPP/InterSLIP

InterSLIP and InterPPP were software packages that enabled Macintosh users to communicate over TCP/IP using dial-up lines without having to use an embedded TCP/IP stack. These products worked with Apple's

MacTCP MacTCP was the standard TCP/IP implementation for the classic Mac OS through version 7.5.1. It was the first application-independent implementation of a TCP stack for a non-Unix platform and predates Winsock by over 5 years. Released in 1988, it is ...

InterPrint

InterPrint was a printing product designed to allow Macintoshes to print to

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

printers connected over TCP/IP networks. Mostly used in corporate and prepress environments, the product integrated directly into Apple's printer architecture.

InterServer Publisher

InterServer Publisher was a web, FTP, and gopher server package designed to run in the background on a Macintosh.

Planet X

Planet X was an

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

client for Macintosh that allowed you to send the screen from your Macintosh as a window to any

server. The product was developed by a third party and was marketed and sold by InterCon starting in 1991.

WatchTower

WatchTower was the first

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...

Network Monitoring System Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitorin ...

developed for the Macintosh computer Developed by GBP Software (now ClueTrust) and published and sold by InterCon starting in 1990, WatchTower was the first product of its kind on the Macintosh. Although it was never a high volume product (not surprising at a retail price of $2,495), it did represent the first monitor (and agent) for the Macintosh.

IPv6 Participation

When the initial research for IPv6 was being done, InterCon participated by creating an implementation of the SIPP protocol running on the Macintosh as part of an experimental version of TCP/Connect II. Although SIPP wasn't adopted, this early effort confirmed the interest of Internet software vendors in creating IPv6-capable software.

Internet Services in Japan (IIKK)

In 1992, InterCon saw the need to expand commercial internet services in Japan in order to bolster its position in the TCP/IP market there. To do this, the company created a

ese subsidiary, IIKK and partnered with AT&T JENS (a subsidiary of AT&T) to create the first commercial internet service providers in the country. IIKK's initial POP was in Joi Ito's bathroom.Ito,Joi.
Picture of PSINet Japan POP 1994
/ref> IIKK's first offices were in an old karaoke bar in Myogadani.Clark, Tanya
"Daring to Be Different -- Tokyo's GOL: An Idiosyncratic Success Story"
[email protected]. November, 1999. PSINet purchased IIKK and it became the core of PSINet Japan.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Intercon Systems Corporation Companies established in 1988 Defunct companies of Japan Defunct Internet service providers Internet service providers of Japan