Interlink Computer Sciences, of

Fremont, California Fremont is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. Located in the East Bay region of the Bay Area, Fremont has a population of 230,504 as of 2020, making it the fourth most populous city in the Bay Area, behind San Jose, San Fran ...

, was a developer of hardware and software that allowed IBM

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

s running the MVS operating system to be connected to non-IBM networks. Interlink was founded in 1983 by Lambert Onuma, Fred Wright, Karl Johnson and Greg Thompson, formerly of

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...

. The company's first product, called simply ''Interlink'', allowed IBM MVS mainframes to be connected to

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

computers on a

DECnet DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation. Originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers, it evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC ...

network. Later a VM/DECnet product was developed in cooperation with Dupont to link IBM VM/CMS systems with a DECnet network interconnecting e-mail, file, tape, and storage access, terminal emulation, a program-to-program API, and enabling DECnet to be tunneled over an SNA LU6.2 network. In 1990, Interlink acquired a product called ''ACCES/MVS'' from Advanced Computer Communications, which implemented a native

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 ...

protocol stack on the MVS and VM operating systems and within CICS regions. First released in 1986, ACCES/MVS had been the first commercial TCP/IP implementation for MVS mainframes. Interlink developed and marketed this product as ''SNS/TCPaccess''. The prefix was later dropped, and TCPaccess became the company's main focus of development by the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, in 1989, IBM had introduced its own TCP/IP offering on MVS. This product had been

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a Computing platform, computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) ...

from the VM operating system, and required expensive and inefficient protocol conversions. Interlink was able to successfully sell TCPaccess as a more efficient and better-performing alternative, and as late as 1996 it still held 25% of the TCP/IP market on MVS. As the decade progressed, IBM improved its product, and Interlink's market share steadily eroded. In August 1996, Interlink became a public corporation, with an initial offering of $10 per share on the

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

exchange. In December of that year, a strategic agreement was announced with

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

to jointly develop and market the TCPaccess product as ''Cisco IOS for S/390''. Shares of Interlink stock jumped to $15 on this news, and ultimately approached $18. Sales of the re-branded Cisco product fell below expectations, and Interlink struggled to rebuild its own sales channel. Interlink stock eventually fell below $4 per share. In 1998, Interlink introduced ''e-Control'', a new TCP/IP network management product for the mainframe. The company came to the attention of Dallas-based Sterling Software Inc., which had its own product in this space. In March, 1999, Sterling announced it had agreed to acquire Interlink Computer Sciences Inc. for $7 per share. The deal was valued at $64 million. On May 3, 1999, the acquisition was completed.

References

{{reflist Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct software companies of the United States