T/Maker Company

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The T/Maker Company was an early personal computer software company, formed in 1983  by siblings Peter and Heidi Roizen, Mountain View, California, to market CP/M and MS-DOS 3rd party programs. They expanded into the Apple Macintosh market, releasing the ClickArt line of clip art. Other products included WriteNow on the Apple Macintosh and NeXT computers.

T/Maker (Table Maker) was one of the first spreadsheet programs designed for the personal computer user and released by Peter Roizen in 1979. The application ran on CP/M, TRSDOS, and later on MS-DOS computers. T/Maker was originally distributed by Lifeboat Associates of New York.

T/Maker took a different approach to most other spreadsheets: instead of embedding formulas in each cell, formulas were defined on a per-row and per-column basis in the margins.

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 and were accessible in 'word' type documents.

Their other products included Personal Publisher, a consumer-oriented desktop publishing application for the PC (acquired by Software Publishing Corporation in 1986), SmartBundle, an "office" styled bundle of major applications, Vroombooks, a multimedia storybook, and the Macintosh word processor WriteNow, (which it licensed from NeXT in 1985 and ultimately sold to WordStar in 1993).

Heidi and Royal Farros purchased T/Maker from Peter in 1986 and continued until 1989, when Hummer Winblad made an investment. Ann Winblad became a director of the company at that time and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher in 1993 and also joined the board.

T/Maker was acquired in 1994 by Deluxe Corporation. Both Heidi and Royal left the company in 1996.

T/Maker’s remaining products were acquired by Broderbund, who continued to market and expand the ClickArt line.

 

T/Maker Company

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