Lighthouse Design
Encyclopedia
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
.
, who were acquired by Microsoft
in 2000.
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
), Diagram!, TaskMaster
(a project management program), WetPaint (an image editing/retouching program) 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
technology, which was known as Distributed Objects Everywhere
(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
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 to Java would be almost impossible. Additionally, Sun was worried that releasing their own suite would make 3rd party developers less interested in the platform (see Claris
) as they would have to compete with Sun directly in the office application space. Sun eventually gave up on the idea, if they ever entertained it seriously in the first place, abandoning the office application market for many years.
It was not until 1999 that Sun once again entered this market. Oddly, they did so not with a Java suite, but by purchasing the C++
-based StarOffice
suite. According to Jonathan Schwartz, the former chief executive officer
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.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
software
Computer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
computers running the NeXTSTEP
NEXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP was the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers, such as the NeXTcube...
operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz
Jonathan I. Schwartz
Jonathan Ian Schwartz is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Picture of Health. He was formerly the President and CEO of Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle, and previously the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a software company focused on...
, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner, in Bethesda, Maryland
Bethesda, Maryland
Bethesda is a census designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House , which in turn took its name from Jerusalem's Pool of Bethesda...
. Lighthouse later moved to San Mateo, California
San Mateo, California
San Mateo is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a population of approximately 100,000 , it is one of the larger suburbs on the San Francisco Peninsula, located between Burlingame to the north, Foster City to the east, Belmont to the south,...
. In 1996, Lighthouse was acquired by Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
.
History
Two of the first products developed at Lighthouse were Diagram! and Exploder. Diagram! was a drawing tool, in which objects are connected together using "smart links" to construct diagrams such a flow charts. Diagram was copied by Visio CorporationVisio Corporation
Visio Corporation was a software company based in Seattle, Washington. Its principal product was a diagramming application software of the same name. It was acquired by Microsoft and is now in a division of that company, which continues to develop the application under the name Microsoft...
, who were acquired by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
in 2000.
Exploder was a programming tool for storing Objective-C
Objective-C
Objective-C is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language.Today, it is used primarily on Apple's Mac OS X and iOS: two environments derived from the OpenStep standard, though not compliant with it...
objects in a Relational database
Relational database
A relational database is a database that conforms to relational model theory. The software used in a relational database is called a relational database management system . Colloquial use of the term "relational database" may refer to the RDBMS software, or the relational database itself...
. Lighthouse marketed Diagram! directly, and in 1991 spun off
Spin out
A spin-out, also known as a spin-off or a starburst, refers to a type of corporate action where a company "splits off" sections of itself as a separate business....
the Exploder into a new startup
Startup company
A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets...
, Persistence Software. Persistence Software went public with an IPO
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...
on June 25, 1999.
Lighthouse went on to develop and acquire more software products, and marketed an office suite
Office suite
In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a collection of programs intended to be used by knowledge workers...
for NeXTSTEP, which included ParaSheet (a traditional spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
), Quantrix
Quantrix
Quantrix is a spreadsheet program based on the pioneering Lotus Improv, and introduced by Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP in the early '90s when Lotus stopped selling Improv...
(a spreadsheet program based on Lotus Improv
Lotus Improv
Lotus Improv was a spreadsheet program from Lotus Development that attempted to re-define the way a spreadsheet should work. Instead of treating the grid as the system for referencing data, Improv made all data exist in named ranges. Operations on the data then referred to these names, rather than...
), Diagram!, TaskMaster
Taskmaster
Taskmaster is a fictional character in the Marvel Comics universe. The character is primarily a supervillain but is often portrayed as an antihero. The Taskmaster first appeared in Avengers vol.1 #195 and was created by David Michelinie and George Pérez...
(a project management program), WetPaint (an image editing/retouching program) and Concurrence (a presentation program).
In the early 1990s, Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
entered a major partnership with NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
to develop OpenStep
OpenStep
OpenStep was an object-oriented application programming interface specification for an object-oriented operating system that used a non-NeXTSTEP operating system as its core, principally developed by NeXT with Sun Microsystems. OPENSTEP was a specific implementation of the OpenStep API developed...
, essentially a cross-platform version of the "upper layers" of the NeXTSTEP
NEXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP was the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers, such as the NeXTcube...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer 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
Portable Distributed Objects, or PDO, is a programming 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 use of Objective-C made the package very easy to write...
technology, which was known as Distributed Objects Everywhere
Distributed Objects Everywhere
Distributed Objects Everywhere 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 thereafter, it remained vaporware for many years before...
(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
Scott McNealy is an American business executive. He co-founded computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim.-Biography:...
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
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
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
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
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 to Java would be almost impossible. Additionally, Sun was worried that releasing their own suite would make 3rd party developers less interested in the platform (see Claris
Claris
Claris was a computer software developer formed as a spin-off from Apple Computer in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were owned by Apple, notably MacWrite and MacPaint, in order to separate Apple's application software activities from its hardware and...
) as they would have to compete with Sun directly in the office application space. Sun eventually gave up on the idea, if they ever entertained it seriously in the first place, abandoning the office application market for many years.
It was not until 1999 that Sun once again entered this market. Oddly, they did so not with a Java suite, but by purchasing the C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
-based StarOffice
StarOffice
StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before its discontinuation in 2010, is a proprietary office suite. It was originally developed by StarDivision which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999...
suite. According to Jonathan Schwartz, the former chief executive officer
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
of Lighthouse, the Lighthouse application suite will probably never again be offered to the public
Public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individuals, and the public is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science,...
.
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.
External links
- Archive of Lighthouse Design's products. Accessed on June 6, 2011.