Lighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner, in Bethesda, Maryland. Lighthouse later moved to San Mateo, California. In 1996, Lighthouse was acquired by Sun Microsystems [1].
Products
Two of the first products developed at Lighthouse were Diagram! and Exploder. Diagram! was a drawing tool similar to Microsoft Visio, in which objects are connected together using "smart links" to contruct diagrams such a flow charts. Exploder was a programming tool for storing Objective-C objects in a Relational database. Lighthouse marketed Diagram! directly, and in 1991 spun off the Exploder into a new startup, Persistence Software. Persistence Software went public with an IPO on June 25, 1999.
Lighthouse went on to develop and acquire more software products, and marketed an office suite for NeXTSTEP, which included ParaSheet (a traditional spreadsheet), Quantrix (a spreadsheet program based on Lotus Improv [2]), Diagram!, TaskMaster, a project management program, and Concurrence (a presentation program) [3]. According to Jonathan I. Schwartz, the former chief executive officer of Lighthouse Design, the office suite will probably never again be offered to the public, now that it is under the control of Sun Microsystems and they have their own office suite called StarOffice [4].
Lighthouse was unique in that it offered most of its products for sale over the internet. This was generally not possible at the time due to the low uptake of the internet on most computers, but the NeXT platform, being based on Unix, was generally connected even in the "early days". Physical copies were available, but only on request and at a higher price. Generally users downloaded the application from the 'net or an online service, and then purchased a license from Lighthouse to fully activate the product. This was a fairly common sales technique for shareware applications, but it appears that combining this with a self-serve internet site was extremely rare, if not unique.
References
^ Kalin, Sari (June 1996). "PC Expo: Sun buys object developer". Accessed on August 25, 2005.
^ Archive of Lighthouse Design's products. Accessed on August 30, 2005.
^ Orlowski, Andrew {September 2003). The Register: "Sun's ‘MacOS X’ suite to remain in Sun morgue". Accessed on August 30, 2005.
^ A Lighthouse Design announces Quantrix 2.0. Accessed on August 30, 2005.
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