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However, the company was best known for its WinFax software package of the early- to mid-1990s, which enabled computers equipped with fax-modems to communicate faxes to stand-alone fax machines or other similarly-equipped computers. Delrina also produced a set of popular screensavers, including one that resulted in the well-publicized "flying toasters" lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement (Berkeley Systems Inc. v. Delrina); the case set a precedent in American law that satiric commercial software products were not subject to the same First Amendment exemptions as parodic cartoons or literature. After the buyout by Symantec in 1995, parts of the firm were sold off, As of June 30th, 2006, Symantec announced its plan to discontinue WinFax PRO. In its wake, several of Delrina's former executives founded venture capital firms that continue to have a lasting impact on the Canadian software industry. BeginningsThe company was founded in 1988 by Zimbabwean expatriate Bert Amato, and South African expatriates Mark Skapinker and Dennis Bennie. The previous year, Amato and Skapinker came up with the idea of creating electronic business form software. They met with Bennie, who was then the Chief Executive Officer of Carolian Systems International, a firm that made business software for Hewlett-Packard. He arranged for an initial seed investment of $1.5 million CAD to create a new start-up company to develop this idea, which was called "Delrina", a name derived from the family members of Bennie's family: DEnnis, Laura, RIkki, and daNA. For much of its existence its headquarters was located at 895 Don Mills Road, in the Morneau Sobeco Centre in the northern part of Toronto. The company would extend its reach worldwide, and would eventually have branch offices located in San Jose, California; Kirkland, Washington; Washington, DC; and Lexington, Massachusetts as well as other offices in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
Forms productsThe company's first product was PerForm, an electronic forms software package. This and its sibling product FormFlow (which was aimed at workgroup and enterprise-level electronic forms processing and delivery) became the leading products of its class, both of which specialized in workflow forms processing prior to the commercial impact of the Internet and the advent of Web-based forms. The products were designed to allow users to create self-contained form applications which could be passed back and forth across a network. Both PerForm and FormFlow consisted of two distinct parts: "Designer", used to create the form application, and "Filler", so users could submit the forms either by fax, and later, email. The program could ease repetitive fill tasks, include mandatory fields, and use a "mask" to accept only data entered in a valid format. The information could be saved and restored in a dBase file, and it used a Public-key cryptography system to encrypt the data running from client to server.
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