T/Maker
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T/Maker Company was an early personal computer software company. Created in 1979 by software engineer Peter Roizen (who received his bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley[1][2]), the original product, "Table Maker," later shortened to "T/Maker," was one of the first spreadsheet programs designed for the personal computer user.[3] The application ran on CP/M, TRSDOS, and later on MS-DOS computers.
Although T/Maker was released six months after VisiCalc, it was perhaps the first application to provide an 'office' suite approach to data. Tables could be used in databases or spreadsheets & were accessible in 'word' type documents. At the time this was ground breaking; it had never been done before.
T/Maker was originally distributed by Lifeboat Associates of New York. In 1983 T/Maker Company was incorporated in Mountain View, California by Heidi Roizen – Peter's sister and a then-recent Stanford University Graduate School of Business graduate – who became its CEO.
The T/Maker Company went on to publish its own line of integrated applications, and also products by others intended for DOS and Windows computers as well as the Apple Macintosh. These included ClickArt, Personal Publisher (which was acquired by Software Publishing Corporation in 1986), ClickOn Worksheet (which was acquired by Borland in 1987), Vroombooks, and the popular Macintosh word processor WriteNow (which it licensed from NeXT in 1985 and ultimately sold to WordStar in 1992).
The company bootstrapped itself from its founding until 1989, when it became venture capital firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners’ first investment. Ann Winblad became a director of the company at that time. Tim Draper of Draper Fisher led the company’s second round in 1993 and also joined the board. T/Maker was acquired in 1994 by Deluxe Corporation. Heidi Roizen left the company in 1996 to become VP of Worldwide Developer Relations at Apple Computer.
T/Maker’s remaining products were ultimately acquired by Broderbund, who continues to market and expand the ClickArt line of clip art.
[edit] References
- ^ Mandy Major (2003-12-17). New board game is 'Scrabble' gone wild. Los Gatos Weekely Times.
- ^ Peter Roizen. Resume of Peter Roizen.
- ^ Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work, Microsoft Press-1986. p. 198. The Visicalc spreadsheet program was released while T/Maker was still under development.
