InterCon Systems Corporation

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

~ the eulogy ~

By the time I plugged a modem into a phone line in 1998, this company had been dismantled for a year, and it had never been aimed at a machine like mine anyway. InterCon sold networking software for the Macintosh in the years when getting a Mac onto a TCP/IP network was a purchase decision rather than a checkbox, and I was on a PC in Turkey with whatever stack Windows shipped.

Kurt D. Baumann and Mikki Barry incorporated it in Virginia in April 1988 with three people. The premise was narrow and correct: Macintoshes were going to end up on networks full of machines that were not Macintoshes, and somebody had to sell the software for that. In 1988 it was still an open argument whether TCP/IP or the OSI protocols would be the thing everyone standardized on, and betting the company on the first one was a bet.

TCP/Connect launched at Macworld in August 1988 as a commercial NCSA Telnet with a support phone number. Two months later at the first InterOp it had a graphical FTP client, one of the earliest on the platform, and IBM 3270 emulation. The rewrite, TCP/Connect II, ran from 1990 to 1995 and turned into a full suite: mail with embedded graphics and real filtering, a news reader, terminal emulations, a gopher client, and eventually a web browser. Alongside it the company sold NFS/Share into schools and pre-press shops, InterPrint for PostScript over IP, InterSLIP and InterPPP for dial-up on top of Apple's MacTCP, and WatchTower, the first SNMP monitor anybody wrote for a Mac, at $2,495 a copy.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shark that shipped under other names ~

In 1995 InterCon carved the suite into consumer pieces and called them sharks. NetShark carried mail and web with the terminal emulation stripped out, and WebShark was the browser on its own. MailShark was built and never sold. The browser is the part that got out into the world. AOL licensed it in May 1995 for its Macintosh dial-up client, and it went out to subscribers in the 2.6 release that August. Apple then shipped a rebadged WebShark as the eWorld Web Browser.

So a Virginia company with a hundred employees wrote the browser that two of the largest online services in America handed to their Mac customers, under two other brand names, in the year Netscape went public. Almost nobody who used it ever saw the word InterCon.

~ a POP in a bathroom ~

In 1992 the company set up a Japanese subsidiary called IIKK to sell into a market that had no commercial internet access to sell into. It partnered with AT&T JENS to build the first commercial ISPs in the country. The first point of presence was in Joi Ito's bathroom. The first offices were a converted karaoke bar in Myogadani.

That is not a joke about a startup being scrappy, it is what the commercial internet in Japan physically consisted of in 1992. When PSINet later bought InterCon it took IIKK with it, and IIKK became PSINet Japan.

~ what Ascend bought ~

PSINet announced the acquisition on 6 June 1995 and kept selling and maintaining the software. In February 1996 it merged InterCon with Software Ventures, another Macintosh communications vendor, on the theory that one Mac software group was cheaper than two. tcpCONNECT4 shipped later that year with few changes, and then in February 1997 the engineering group and the whole product line went to Ascend Communications, a router company that wanted the people.

There was no shutdown notice because there was no shutdown, only a sale, then another sale, then the products stopping. What survives is oddly specific: an experimental SIPP build on the Mac from the early IPv6 research, a NetShark archive in the evolt browser collection, and the eWorld browser that a lot of people remember without knowing whose code it was.

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