WinComm was a communications software package that was offered by Delrina

Delrina

Delrina was a Canadian software company founded by four individuals, Dennis Bennie as CEO and chairman, Mark Skapinker as president, Bert Amato as executive vice president and chief technical officer and Lou Ryan as executive vice president of world wide sales...

 in the mid 1990s.

Seeing a growing business in online communications utilities, Delrina launched WinComm PRO. It was used primarily to connect to Bulletin Board Systems

Bulletin board system

A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

 of the time, prior to the advent of the Internet. By double-clicking on an icon, the program would automatically connect to any of a number pre-defined online services, such as Delphi

Delphi online service

Delphi was an early U.S. online service provider that started as a nationwide dialup service in 1983.- History :The company that became Delphi was founded by Wes Kussmaul as Kussmaul Encyclopedia in 1981, featured ASCII-based encyclopedia, E-mail, and a primitive chat...

, Compuserve

CompuServe

CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

 or GEnie

GEnie

GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...

, or to any other local BBS a user may have had defined.

Delrina tried to expand aggressively into this market space, first by acquiring the Canadian online bulletin board service CRS Online, and then using it as a distribution channel for free versions of its WinComm LITE and DOS-based FreeComm products in March 1995. The WinComm PRO product culminated in version 7.0, which was bundled with the CommSuite 95

CommSuite 95

CommSuite 95 was a communications software "suite" of products launched by the Canadian software company Delrina in December, 1995. It was a 32-bit based program created specifically for use in Windows 95...

 software package, which also included versions of WinFax

WinFax

WinFax is a Microsoft Windows-based software product designed to let computers equipped with fax-modems to communicate directly to stand-alone fax machines, or other similarly equipped computers.-History:...

 and Cyberjack

Cyberjack

Cyberjack was the name for a Web browser application created by Delrina in 1995. It was sold as a stand-alone product, and was also bundled as part of Delrina's CommSuite 95 offering....

.
WinComm was a relative latecomer to the market, which was dominated at the time by Datastorm

Datastorm Technologies, Inc.

Datastorm was a computer software company that existed from 1986 until 1996. The company was founded by Bruce Barkelew and Thomas Smith.Datastorm and their software, ProComm, was prominent in a pre-TCP/IP world where computer-to-computer modem connections were common...

's Procomm series of products.

External links

• Review of WinComm PRO 7.0, accessed November 6, 2005