Cyberjack

» see cyberjack.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Cyberjack was Delrina's answer to the web, sold on its own and bundled into CommSuite 95 beside WinFax PRO 7.0. One install gave you a browser, an FTP client, a Usenet reader, an IRC client and a graphical front end for gopher, with a wizard that passed you from one to the next without quitting anything. A beta of Cyberjack 7.0 was downloadable in early October 1995, which is early enough that the claim of being the first 32-bit web browsing program was worth printing on the box.

Two holes sank it. The browser could not render tables, and tables were taking over page layout that same year. There was also no mail client, in a suite whose entire pitch was that everything came in one package. Symantec shipped an update on 17 April 1996 that added table support and a telnet client, about a year after anyone needed it.

The competition was free. Internet Explorer 2 came out in November 1995 at no charge at all, and Netscape Navigator was already on the machine of anyone who cared. A boxed commercial suite had to beat both of them to justify its shelf price, and PC Magazine's first look at CommSuite 95 reported that Cyberjack displayed many pages incorrectly.

~ the record ~

~ six people in durban ~

The code was not Canadian. Cyberjack was written by Vironix Software Laboratories, a small South African company owned by Dave and Paula Hall, working first from Westville near Durban and then from a new office in Muizenberg, a beach town outside Cape Town. The entire programming team was about six people, which worked out at roughly one developer per internet application in the suite.

Vironix sold the suite to Delrina, and Symantec bought Delrina on 22 November 1995 in a stock deal worth $415 million, so a product written by six people near the Indian Ocean ended up as a line item in an American security company's catalog. After Symantec discontinued it, Vironix went into liquidation. Some of the team went on to write WebFerret, the little search tool that a lot more people ended up installing than ever installed Cyberjack.

~ the page that stopped ~

There is no press release announcing the end. What there is instead is the support site. cyberjack.com served a single screen whose images were all hosted on symantec.com, and in the captures from December 1997 and January 1998 it is identical: a Cyberjack logo over a clickable map that goes nowhere, with one live heading underneath offering a free trial download of WinFax PRO 8.0. At the bottom it reads "Last revised: May 21, 1997". By 18 April 1999 the whole /cyberjack/ directory on symantec.com answers 404, and the page it belonged to is gone with it.

The domain is still registered. It loads a script that bounces you to a parking lander.

~ what i was doing instead ~

My first modem at home came in 1998, which is after all of this. By then Internet Explorer arrived with Windows and Netscape was a download your friend brought on a floppy, so the idea of paying for a box that contained a browser had already stopped making sense in Turkey, if it ever started. Cyberjack belongs to the two or three years when it was still an open question whether software like this was something you bought.

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