InterCon Systems Corporation (a

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

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

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

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 network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

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 communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

protocols or

OSI protocols The Open Systems Interconnection protocols are a family of information exchange standards developed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization, ISO and the ITU-T. The standardization process began in 1977. While the seven-la ...

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 continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. In June 1995, InterCon was acquired by

PSINet PSINet, formerly Performance Systems International, was an American internet service provider based in Northern Virginia. As one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), it was involved in the commercialization of the Internet ...

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, Inc. 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 investo ...

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 The IBM 3270 is a family of Block-oriented terminal, block oriented display and printer computer terminals introduced by IBM in 1971 and normally used to communicate with IBM mainframes. The 3270 was the successor to the IBM 2260 display ter ...

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 navy, 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 ...

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 An Internet suite is an Internet-related software suite. Internet suites usually include a web browser, e-mail client (often with a news client and address book), download manager, HTML editor, and an IRC client. The diversity of Internet suite o ...

. 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 Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...

client; and many minor features and protocols. After the introduction of InterCon's web browser in TCP/Connect II, AOL 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 An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in ...

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 File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...

system for

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

's line of

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user 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, a ...

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 In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

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 AOL 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.

InterPrint

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

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

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 The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

, 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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

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 behavior. Devices that typically su ...

Network Monitoring System 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 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

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 AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

) 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 Software companies established in 1988 Defunct companies of Japan Defunct Internet service providers Internet service providers of Japan Defunct software companies of the United States