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 on December 3, 2005. Macromedia originated with the 1992 merger of Authorware Inc. (makers of Authorware) and MacroMind–Paracomp (makers of Macromind Director). Director, an interactive multimedia-authoring tool used to make presentations, animations, CD-ROMs and information kiosks, served as Macromedia's flagship product until the mid-1990s. Authorware was Macromedia's principal product in the interactive learning market. As the Internet moved from a university research medium to a commercial network, Macromedia began working to web-enable its existing tools and develop new products like Dreamweaver. Macromedia created Shockwave, a Director-viewer plugin for web browsers. The first multimedia playback in Netscape's browser was a Director plug-in. Macromedia licensed Sun's Java Programming Language in October 1995. By 2002, Macromedia had produced more than 20 products and had 30 offices in 13 countries. In January 1995, Macromedia acquired Altsys Corporation after Adobe Systems announced a merger with Altsys' business partner, the Aldus Corporation. Altsys was the developer of the vector-drawing program FreeHand, which had been licensed by Aldus for marketing and sales. Because of the similarities with Adobe Illustrator, the Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint in October 1994 ordering the divestiture of FreeHand back to Altsys. With Macromedia's acquisition of Altsys, it received FreeHand thus expanding its product line of multimedia graphics software to include illustration and design graphics software. FreeHand's vector graphics rendering engine and other software components within the program would prove useful to Macromedia in the development of Fireworks. In March 1996, Macromedia acquired iBand Software, makers of the Backstage HTML authoring tool and application server.