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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 Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which i ...
. Lighthouse later moved to
San Mateo, California San Mateo ( ; ) is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. About 20 miles (32 km) south of San Francisco, the city borders Burlingame to the north, Hillsborough to the west, San Francisco Bay and Foster C ...
. In 1996, Lighthouse was acquired by Sun Microsystems.


History

Two of the first products developed at Lighthouse were Diagram! and Exploder. Diagram! was a drawing tool, originally called BLT (for Box-and-Line Tool) in which objects (boxes) are connected together using "smart links" (lines) to construct diagrams such a flow charts. Exploder was a programming tool for storing
Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTS ...
objects in a relational database. Lighthouse marketed Diagram! directly, and in 1991 spun off the Exploder into a new startup,
Persistence Software Persistence Software was an American software company that operated from 1991 to 2004. Persistence developed software for object-relational mapping. The company was founded in 1991 by Derek Henninger, Christopher Keene and Richard Jensen in San Ma ...
. Persistence Software went public with an
IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
on June 25, 1999. Lighthouse went on to develop and acquire more software products, and marketed an
office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings ...
for NeXTSTEP, which included ParaSheet (a traditional spreadsheet), Quantrix (a spreadsheet program based on Lotus Improv), Diagram!, TaskMaster (a project management program), WetPaint (an image editing/retouching program), LightPlan (an OMT-based computer data modeling tool, based on Diagram!), and Concurrence (a presentation program). In the early 1990s, Sun Microsystems entered a major partnership with NeXT to develop OpenStep, essentially a cross-platform version of the "upper layers" of the NeXTSTEP operating system. OpenStep would provide a NeXT-like system running on top of any suitably powerful underlying operating system, in Sun's case, Solaris. Sun planned a distributed computing environment, with users running OpenStep on the desktop, and the transaction processing occurring on servers in the back-office. The two would communicate with NeXT's
Portable Distributed Objects Portable Distributed Objects (PDO) is an application programming interface (API) for creating object-oriented code that can be executed remotely on a network of computers. It was created by NeXT Computer, Inc. using their OpenStep system, whose us ...
technology, which was known as
Distributed Objects Everywhere Distributed Objects Everywhere (DOE) was a long-running Sun Microsystems project to build a distributed computing environment based on the CORBA system in the 'back end' and OpenStep as the user interface. First started in 1990 and announced soon t ...
(DOE), later released as NEO. In mid-1996, Sun purchased Lighthouse for $22 million, turning them into their in-house OpenStep applications group. At the time,
Scott McNealy Scott McNealy (born November 13, 1954) is an American businessman. He is most famous for co-founding the computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim. In 2004, while still at Sun, ...
had visions of turning Sun into a powerhouse that would compete head-to-head with Microsoft, and an office applications suite was a requirement for any such plan. Lighthouse's applications were not up to par with Microsoft Office as a whole, but certainly could have been developed into a direct competitor with additional development. But even as the purchase of Lighthouse was going through, Sun was already turning their attention from DOE/NEO on the back-end and OpenStep on the front-end to "Java everywhere". Java was seen as a better solution to infiltrating Sun into the applications market, as it ran on all platforms, not just those supported by OpenStep. Lighthouse was soon moved into the JavaSoft division, becoming the Java Applications Group. The only problem with this move was that any attempt to port Lighthouse's OpenStep applications written in Objective-C to Java would be almost impossible. Additionally, Sun was worried that releasing their own suite would make third party developers less interested in the platform (see
Claris Claris International Inc., formerly FileMaker Inc., is a computer software development company formed as a subsidiary company of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were ...
) as they would have to compete with Sun directly in the office application space. Some attempts were made: LightPlan was ported to Java and released as JavaPlan (and also switched from OMT to UML). Sun eventually gave up on the idea, if it ever entertained it seriously in the first place, abandoning the office application market for many years. Later,
OmniGroup The Omni Group is an American software company that develops software for the macOS, iOS, and watchOS platforms. The Omni Group was informally founded as a NEXTSTEP consulting company in 1989 by Wil Shipley, who immediately brought on Ken Case ...
cloned Diagram! as
OmniGraffle OmniGraffle is a diagramming and digital illustration application for macOS and iOS created by The Omni Group. Uses OmniGraffle is used to create graphics and visuals. The application features several design tools, along with a drag-and-drop ...
, which conceptually operates in much the same way as Diagram! and the original BLT. It was not until 1999 that Sun once again entered this market. Oddly, it did so not with a Java suite, but by purchasing the
C++ C, or c, is the third letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''cee'' (pronounced ), plural ''cees''. History "C" ...
-based StarOffice suite. According to Jonathan Schwartz, the former
chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...
of Lighthouse, the Lighthouse application suite will probably never again be offered to the public. Lighthouse co-founder Schwartz continued to move up through the ranks at Sun, becoming the head of its software division in 2002, and in April 2006 was named Sun's CEO and President.


See also

*
OmniWeb OmniWeb is a discontinued web browser that was developed and marketed by The Omni Group exclusively for Apple's macOS operating system. Though a stable version is no longer maintained, it is still available as a free download and unstable version ...


References

{{Reflist


External links


Archive of Lighthouse Design's products
Accessed on June 6, 2011. Companies based in California Software companies disestablished in 1996 Software companies established in 1989 Defunct software companies of the United States Sun Microsystems acquisitions 1996 mergers and acquisitions