MacroMind was an Apple Macintosh software company founded in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 in 1984 by Marc Canter

Marc Canter

Marc Canter is CEO of Broadband Mechanics, which produces People Aggregator, a social networking tool with source available . Previously, he was a founder of the company that became Macromedia. His blog, Marc's Voice, frequently critiques other Internet luminaries and competitors, such as Mark...

, Jay Fenton

Jamie Fenton

Jamie Faye Fenton is a game programmer. She is known for being the programmer of the 1981 hit arcade game, Gorf, before she transitioned from male to female around 1998. The community of transgendered people is a place where Jamie has been active...

 and Mark Stephen Pierce. The company's first product was SoundVision, a combined music and graphics editor. Before the release, the graphics editor was removed, and SoundVision became MusicWorks. Along with other early programs, MusicWorks was originally distributed by Hayden Software.

In 1988 the company moved to San Francisco, and in 1991 MacroMind merged with Paracomp

Paracomp

Paracomp was a Macintosh programming company known for their 3D software, Swivel 3D and ModelShop and Filmaker. Filmaker was known for its packaging which was a 16mm film reel tin which was used to contain the software and manuals. It was acquired by MacroMind in 1990 to briefly form...

 to become MacroMind-Paracomp, then in 1992 with Authorware, Inc forming Macromedia

Macromedia

Macromedia was an American graphics and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products as Flash and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005 and controls the line of Macromedia...

.

Products

• MusicWorks (1984) - music composer
• VideoWorks (1985), VideoWorks II (1987) and VideoWorks Interactive - multimedia animation software
• Art Grabber/Body Shop (1985) - clip art
  Clip art
  Clip art, in the graphic arts, refers to pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. Today, clip art is used extensively in both personal and commercial projects, ranging from home-printed greeting cards to commercial candles. Clip art comes in many forms, both electronic and printed. However,...
  
   software
• Comic Works/Graphic Works - object based
  Vector graphics
  Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon, which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics...
  
   paint program
• VideoWorks accelerator - animation compiler for VideoWorks files
• MazeWars+ (1987) - multiplayer network game based on the classic Maze War
  Maze War
  Maze War is a video game.Maze War originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands of games to follow, and is considered one of the earliest examples of, or progenitor of, a first-person shooter...
  
  
• Director (1987) - new name for VideoWorks II
• Director 2 (1988) - VideoWorks Interactive when released as a commercial product
• Director 3 (1989)
• Three-D (1990) - 3D modeling and animation software
• Mouse Practice
  Mouse Practice
  Mouse Practice was a game-based computer tutorial aimed at teaching new users how to operate a computer mouse at a time when many were unfamiliar with this feature of a computer....
  
  (1992) – a tutorial on how to use the mouse where the user controls a scuba diver

External links

• Mark Stephen Pierce's resume
• Download MazeWars+
• Computer chronicles: Desktop Publishing #1 (11/2/1986) - demo of desktop publishing software including MacroMind Comic Works