The History Of ICON
ICON Technologies Inc. was born in 1992 in a garage in Mayfield, PA. Since that time the nature of information technology (IT) has changed rapidly and dramatically and ICON has changed right along with it. The early days involved building, repairing & selling 386 and 486 based systems running a revolutionary new operating system called Windows 3.1. The software development we did at this time was primarily done in C++ and networking usually consisted of coaxial cabling and LANtastic.
As the 1990's wore on businesses became more automated and we did much more with business networking and support. Networking had evolved into twisted pair cabling using switches and LANtastic had been largely replaced by Novell NetWare. We still had to deal with a lot of integrating PCs with AS/400 and IBM token ring systems using emulation boards. During this stretch of time a new thing called the Internet was becoming available to the public and ICON became one of the first Internet Service Providers (ISP) in Northeastern Pennsylvania. (We are now the last locally owned ISP still standing.) Our ISP was born using 10 AT&T 14.4 Paradyne modems and a 56K frame relay line from PREPnet. We were still developing software but we had advanced from C++ to FoxPro. Being one of the first ISP's we also became one of the first web site developers in the industry and since it was 1995 that involved liberal usage of the blink tag and putting hit counters on the bottom of every home page.
Dialup eventually gave way to broadband which early on was primarily ISDN and eventually DSL. Web pages began to evolve from tacky ego trips to actual functioning business tools where people could exchange information and actually order and ultimately pay for products. This was the time leading up to the dot com hysteria and we built a number of websites for Internet based start-up business which ranged from the clever to the absurd. We spent a lot of time talking to large media companies who were interested in partnering with an ISP because they thought it would be the next best thing to printing their own money. During the waning days of the millenia business networks continued to grow and with businesses becoming more and more dependent on their systems this lead to the great collective freak-out known as Y2K. As you recall when the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31 1999 we were all going to be hurled into chaos and we would only have the use of simple stone tools and would be forced to use sharp sticks to hunt down our wooly mammoth Big Macs. Once everyone cleared their heads from the Y2K hype and went back to work, large groups of wall street venture capitalists actually began asking the 20 something .com whiz kids that they had been handing millions of dollars to: "Exactly what does your company do?" And thus the dot com bubble had finally burst.
So far during the 21st century ICON has made many changes. We finally moved out of the garage, we shed our individual PC business and moved our focus more heavily to building and supporting business networks & software. Running coax cable and using LANtastic to connect a couple 486 PCs has given way to running miles of fiber optic cable to connect plant floors full of equipment to a business network running custom software. Our ISP model has moved away from just reselling telco services to having engineered and built our own private, microwave broadband network that covers one of the most geographically challenging places on earth. Our software and websites are high-end business tools with dynamic content and e-commerce that have done hundreds of millions of dollars in business transactions. The environment has changed once again with .NET, ASP, PHP and VOIP being the soup du jour, but ICON remains as the leading IT solution provider for all your business needs. This is why we say;
"We take care of Technology so you can take care of BUSINESS."