Company profile → Company history
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Inter-Corporate was founded by Randolf Richardson first as a proprietorship a few years prior to being incorporated in 1992 as the number of clients increased. The core focus has been in computer and networking technologies, including internet technology and computer networking for professional firms.
In 1991 we created a network communications product called LANTalk which was used by staff in professional firms (including some law firms) for real-time client-side communications in Novell NetWare networking environments. This application was used primarily in DOS or Windows 3.11 alongside applications like WordPerfect for short but important communications. Internet technologies such as instant messengers (like ICQ) and IRC (in particular) eventually replaced the need for this application during the mid-to-late 1990s. Throughout the 1990s we also developed a variety of other applications, including in particular:
- A program called "Officiator" for an engineering firm that automates computer tasks (it was written in assembler and relied on DESQview for multi-tasking)
- Quality Control management for a technology manufacturing firm
- Currency conversion pop-up notification application for a multi-national Fortune 500 company's Finance department that needed to communicate currency exchange rates consistently
- Inventory control, point of sale, and invoicing database-backed application for a food wholesaler (development began in the 1980s and we continued to maintain and update it in the 1990s and early 2000s)
- Inventory tracking system for a Fortune 500 beer production company
- Staff certification database application for an organization in the education sector
- Customer tracking and job estimation database application for a roofing company
- Data correction daemon that automatically recovered data files saved on network drives that were often corrupted by buggy end-user applications (which the vendor failed to correct)
- Facsimile analysis (using OCR) daemon that automatically categorized-and-sorted faxes upon arrival (only when certainty was above a 87% threshold)
- Secure video preview system for the movie industry for a special effects and 3D animation company working on various high-profile television series including Star Gate: SG-1
- Fully interactive web sites that provide customer self-management options which automatically update internal records (while also logging all changes)
- Purchase contract application that saves applications in separate datafiles used in the marine industry for nearly a decade before we upgraded it to store all contracts in a central database that also automated customer outreach and follow-up
We also started developing and hosting internet web sites experimentally in the early-to-mid 1990s, which lead to commercial web site hosting, using a variety of products and eventually settling on Apache HTTPd server after using Novell's NetWare/IntranetWare and their Web Server product. We also added Oracle 8i for some database backed web sites using the Perl programming language, but began switching from NetWare and Oracle shortly after the year 2000 to Unix (NetBSD), Apache HTTPd, and PostgreSQL (database) because Novell stopped supporting ModPerl without advance notice, which was a deal-breaker for us because we had invested a lot of development resources into Perl over the years.
Technical acumen
Although Novell's NetWare operating system had served us extremely well, and we were highly satisfied with its excellent performance and stability that hosted Web, DNS, FTP, eMail, Oracle, and a variety of other protocols and services, we eventually phased most of the NetWare systems out as we gradually moved everything over to the Unix environment - then to Debian Linux once it reached the needed maturity - and converted databases, SQL code, and stored procedures from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Oracle had also served us very well, but they announced plans to drop support for NetWare and the increased licensing fees and new licensing terms that Oracle was projecting caused us to consider other products, for which PostgreSQL more than satisfied our technical requirements in addition to being the best free and open source solution for us.
Moving from a Pentium II 233MHz CPU with 256 MBs of memory, which provided excellent performance with NetWare for many years, to multiple servers with at least 64-bit QuadCore Xeon 3.2 GHz CPUs with 8 GBs of memory highlights, in retrospect, how rapidly technology has progressed over slightly more than a decade for us, and our clients. Although virtualization is very popular and offers many wonderful features, our production servers don't virtualize anything and run directly on the hardware for maximum performance (even though the overhead from virtualization, when supported by the hardware, is minimal, it's not eliminated entirely).
Today we continue to keep up-to-date with current technologies and provide a variety of solutions, essential services, and products that cater to the needs of our clients, and with an emphasis on privacy, security, redundancy, and reliability. Some of the technologies include professional-grade eMail services, Perl and ModPerl 2, PHP, WordPress, VPNs, Virtual Servers, and so much more.