Altsys Corporation was a
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...
-based software company founded by
James R. Von Ehr II. It was an early
Apple Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...
developer and publisher.
Three major products from Altsys for PC / Macintosh and NeXT were:
*
Fontographer
Fontographer (FOG) is a font editor for Windows and macOS; it is used to create digital fonts. It was originally developed by Altsys but is now owned by FontLab Ltd.
History Altsys Corporation
In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr II founded the ...
for Windows and Mac OS - font editor
*Font-O-Matic for Windows - font transformer
*Virtuoso for NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and Solaris - vector editor (a version was announced, advertised and demonstrated for Windows NT, but never released)
Altsys' best known product was basically a rebranded Virtuoso licensed to
Aldus Corporation
Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing (DTP) software. PageMaker, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing ...
under the
FreeHand
Freehand may refer to:
* Freehand drawing, a drawing made without the help of devices
* Freehand lace, a bobbin lace worked directly onto fabric
* , drumming technique
* Adobe FreeHand, software package
* ''Free Hand'', a 1975 album by Gentle Gian ...
name, was a vector drawing program that competed with Adobe Illustrator. It was published for many years, originally only on the Macintosh, then also for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
. When Aldus was acquired by Adobe, the licensing agreement that Altsys had with Aldus precluded FreeHand from being part of the deal, so the publishing rights reverted to Altsys. Altsys also published Metamorphosis for Macintosh, a font utility.
Altsys was acquired by
Macromedia
Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems ...
in January, 1995.
Von Ehr became a major Macromedia shareholder and joined the Macromedia board of directors.
References
External links
Altsys Metamorphosis{Dead link, date=June 2020 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes Apple Inc. support article, circa 1990
- lists whole Altsys software line for Windows
Macintosh software companies