Quarterdeck Office Systems, later Quarterdeck Corporation (

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

: QDEK), was an American

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company. It was founded by Therese Myers and Gary Pope in 1981 and incorporated in 1982. Their offices were initially located at 150 Pico Boulevard in

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California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

and later at 13160 Mindanao Way in

Marina del Rey, California Marina del Rey (Spanish for "Marina of the King") is an unincorporated seaside community in Los Angeles County, California, with an eponymous harbor that is a major boating and water recreation destination of the greater Los Angeles area. The p ...

, as well as a sales and technical support unit located in

Clearwater, Florida Clearwater is a city located in Pinellas County, Florida, United States, northwest of Tampa and St. Petersburg. To the west of Clearwater lies the Gulf of Mexico and to the southeast lies Tampa Bay. As of the 2020 census, the city had a populat ...

. In the 1990s, they had a European office in

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. Their most famous products were the

Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM) is a memory manager produced by Quarterdeck Office Systems in the late 1980s through the late 1990s. It was the most popular third-party memory manager for the MS-DOS and other DOS operating systems. ...

DESQview DESQview (DV) is a text mode multitasking operating environment developed by Quarterdeck Office Systems which enjoyed modest popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Running on top of DOS, it allows users to run multiple programs concurrentl ...

, CleanSweep, DESQview/X, Quarterdeck

Mosaic A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

Manifest Manifest may refer to: Computing * Manifest file, a metadata file that enumerates files in a program or package * Manifest (CLI), a metadata text file for CLI assemblies Events * Manifest (convention), a defunct anime festival in Melbourne, Aus ...

and Partition-It. On April 18, 1989, Quarterdeck was awarded a US software

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

that allowed multiple windowed PC applications under

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

. After sales and its stock plummeted in 1995, interim CEO King R. Lee hired

Gaston Bastiaens Gaston Bastiaens (born 16 December 1946 in Westerlo, Belgium) is a Belgian engineer and businessman. As a vice president of Philips Electronics, he was responsible for the Compact Disc as well as for CD-i, CD-ROM, Philips' contributions to the MP ...

as CEO. In order to diversify the company's product offerings, Bastiaens began an ultimately unsuccessful acquisition spree. In 1995, the company acquired Landmark Research International Corp. for 3.5 million shares of Quarterdeck (acquiring

MagnaRAM Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM) is a memory manager produced by Quarterdeck Office Systems in the late 1980s through the late 1990s. It was the most popular third-party memory manager for the MS-DOS and other DOS operating systems. ...

and WinProbe) and then Inset Systems, Inc. of

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in September of that year for 933,000 shares of Quarterdeck (acquiring HiJaak graphics software in the deal). In March 1996, Quarterdeck acquired Datastorm Technologies, Inc., publishers of PROCOMM and PROCOMM PLUS, and relocated its technical support and development operations from

and

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, to Datastorm's

Columbia, Missouri Columbia is a city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It is the county seat of Boone County and home to the University of Missouri. Founded in 1821, it is the principal city of the five-county Columbia metropolitan area. It is Missouri's fourth ...

headquarters. In July 1996, Quarterdeck acquired Vertisoft Systems, publishers of the

DoubleDisk A disk compression software utility increases the amount of information that can be stored on a hard disk drive of given size. Unlike a file compression utility, which compresses only specified files—and which requires the user to designate ...

and Fix-It utilities, also for 3.5 million shares of Quarterdeck. Both Landmark and Vertisoft had extensive revenues from direct-marketing of third party products through telemarketing and direct mail. Bastiaens resigned in August 1996, and Quarterdeck continued under acting Co-CEOs King R. Lee, and Anatoly Tikhman, the former CEO of Vertisoft. The company announced a restructuring and a loss, and in January 1997, Quarterdeck hired Curtis Hessler to run the company. In 1998, with its DOS utilities market all but collapsed, Quarterdeck was acquired for $0.52 per share by Symantec (the

Norton Utilities Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 was released 26 Oc ...

company), which discontinued support of some Quarterdeck products, ''e.g.'', Mosaic, and integrated others into larger offerings, ''e.g.'', CleanSweep, which became part of

Norton SystemWorks Norton SystemWorks is a discontinued utility software suite by Symantec Corp. It integrates three of Symantec's most popular products – Norton Utilities, Norton CrashGuard and Norton AntiVirus – into one program designed to simplify solving ...

List of software products

* CleanSweep * DESQ, predecessor to DESQview *

(DESQ successor, with

IBM TopView TopView is the first object-oriented, multitasking, and windowing, personal computer operating environment for PC DOS developed by IBM, announced in August 1984 and shipped in March 1985. TopView provided a text-mode (although it also ran in gr ...

compatibility) *

DESQview 386 DESQview (DV) is a text mode multitasking operating environment developed by Quarterdeck Office Systems which enjoyed modest popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Running on top of DOS, it allows users to run multiple programs concurrentl ...

(DESQview that shipped bundled with QEMM 386) * DESQview/X (an X based version of DESQview) * GameRunner * GlobalChat IRC client * GlobalStage IRC server (run on irc.scifi.com until 2003) * HiJaak Graphics Suite *

* Partition-It! *

, formerly QEMM 386 * Quarterdeck InternetSuite * Quarterdeck Message Center * Quarterdeck

* Quarterdeck Sidebar * QRAM, an

Intel 80286 The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non- multiplexed address and data buses and also the ...

-based

expanded memory manager In DOS memory management, expanded memory is a system of bank switching that provided additional memory to DOS programs beyond the limit of conventional memory (640 KiB). ''Expanded memory'' is an umbrella term for several incompatible techn ...

* TotalWeb * ViruSweep * Quarterdeck WebAuthor for Word * WebCompass, an early metasearch tool *

WebStar WebSTAR was a web server application for the classic Mac OS. It supported the common gateway interface (CGI) and its own AppleEvents-based W*API for plug-in support, as well as SSL and similar technologies used in most early web servers. Unlike m ...

(via StarNine) * WebTalk * Files.com

References

External links

* * Merger announcement * Usenet group for DESQview * SEC 10-K form for 9/30/96 * Floor plan and Pictures of the Quarterdeck Building located in Columbia, Missouri that was purchased by the University of Missouri. {{Authority control Software companies established in 1982 Defunct software companies of the United States Defunct companies based in California Gen Digital acquisitions 1982 establishments in California