Delrina

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

~ the eulogy ~

Delrina was founded in Toronto in 1988 by Bert Amato, who had come from Zimbabwe, Mark Skapinker and Dennis Bennie, both from South Africa, and Lou Ryan, an American. The name is an acronym of a private kind, assembled out of Bennie's family: DEnnis and Laura and RIkki and daNA. That tells you what kind of company it was at the start, four people who knew each other, in a city with no software industry to speak of, naming the thing after the people at home.

The first product was PerForm, shipped in October 1988, and it was electronic forms software. You scanned a paper form and laid input fields over the image, and from there the form got filled in at a keyboard instead of at a typewriter. That was a real business in 1988, because every organization ran on paper forms and every one of them had a typewriter in a corner being used for nothing else. Delrina sold PerForm into corporate and government accounts and the forms division was the company's identity for its first two years.

WinFax arrived in December 1990 and the identity did not survive it. The first version was modest and PRO 2.0 in June 1991 was the one that took off, and by 1994 something close to a hundred PC manufacturers were putting it on new machines out of the factory. By January 1995 it held about two-thirds of the Windows fax software market with more than ten million copies shipped, and it was generating the large majority of Delrina's revenue. The forms business that started the company was sold off to JetForm in September 1996, after the founders were already gone.

Symantec paid roughly 415 million US dollars in stock and closed the merger on 22 November 1995. It was among the largest exits Canadian software had produced at that point, and it was an unambiguous win for everyone who held Delrina paper. What happened to WinFax afterward, the slow rot under Symantec and the end-of-life notice in 2006, is on its own stone here.

~ the dossier ~

~ the toaster injunction ~

In October 1993 Delrina shipped a screensaver pack built around Berkeley Breathed's Opus the penguin and Bill the Cat. One module was called Death Toasters, and in it Opus stood with a shotgun and blew flying toasters out of the sky. The flying toasters were Berkeley Systems' flying toasters, the most recognizable thing in After Dark and effectively that company's trademark. Berkeley Systems went for a preliminary injunction in September 1993, before the pack was even on shelves.

Judge Eugene Lynch granted it. The reasoning was that a commercial software product does not get the latitude a literary parodist gets, and that the toasters in Delrina's module were the same toasters rather than a commentary on them. Delrina put the legal costs at around 150 thousand US dollars, pulled the module and reissued it with toasters that had propellers instead of wings, and the product sold roughly three times what anyone had forecast because the fight had been in every trade paper for months. Berkeley Systems is buried here too, and so is After Dark.

~ the second phone line ~

The reason this company could exist at all is a piece of North American telephone billing. A small office in Toronto or Chicago paid a flat monthly rate for local calls, so a modem sitting on a second line answering faxes all day cost the same as a modem sitting idle. The second line itself was a small item on a bill you already had. Delrina's entire market was built on top of that arrangement without ever having to mention it.

Turkey did not have that arrangement. Local calls were metered by the minute and you watched the meter, which is why nobody here left a modem answering a line unattended and why the family phone was a thing you were told to get off. A second line meant a separate application and a separate wait. By the time I had a modem at home in 1998, running a fax server on it would have been an expensive hobby rather than an office convenience, and I never once saw a Turkish household do it.

~ after the exit ~

The money went back into the city. Dennis Bennie founded XDL Capital, the X and the D and the L taken from Ex DeLrina, and spent the following decade funding Ontario startups. Mark Skapinker and Anthony Davis, who had written the original WinFax, started Brightspark, which is still one of the better known early-stage firms in Canada. A generation of Toronto founders raised their first round from someone who had been in that building.

That is a larger inheritance than the software. WinFax is a discontinued product with a 2006 notice attached to it and PerForm was absorbed into a forms vendor that itself got bought. The part of Delrina still operating in 2026 is a set of cap tables.

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