The Opera browser was begun by Telenor, the leading Norwegian telecom company, in early 1994. In 1995, Opera was split off into a separate company, Opera Software SA, which remained in Norwegian hands until mid-2016, when the entire Opera browser business was purchased by a Chinese consortium for $600 million, leaving the parent company with […]
Category Archives: Software FAQs
Microsoft Office hasn’t been around forever, or even quite as long as the Macintosh, but it has been around for a long, long time. Microsoft Word 1.0 was released for Mac in 1984 and soon became the Mac’s dominant word processing app. Microsoft Excel 1.0 was a Mac-first application and arrived in 1985. PowerPoint 1.0 came […]
Microsoft Excel was not Microsoft’s first spreadsheet program. That honor went to Multiplan, released in 1982 as a competitor to VisiCalc, the world’s first electronic spreadsheet. Although it was quickly eclipsed by Lotus 1-2-3, Multiplan became the first Mac spreadsheet (and Microsoft’s first GUI spreadsheet) when it was introduced in 1984.
Microsoft PowerPoint began its life as Presenter and was published for exclusively Macintosh by Forethought, Inc. Microsoft acquired Forethought in 1987 and renamed the app PowerPoint.
MacPaint was one of two applications bundled with the original Macintosh; it and was the Mac’s default paint program. It was written by Bill Atkinson, and its user interface was designed by Susan Kare. It continued as freeware through version 2.0. MacPaint images could be copied to the clipboard and pasted into MacWrite documents.
MacDraw was the Mac’s first drawing program. The vector-based drawing program was based on LisaDraw, which had been created for Apple’s Lisa computer – both applications were produced by Mark Cutter. MacDraw was especially useful for technical drawing, such as floorplans and flowcharts.
ClarisWorks 1.0 redefined the software category pioneered by Microsoft Works. Where Microsoft’s package was a software suite containing separate word processor, spreadsheet, and database programs, ClarisWorks was a single program.
MacWrite was bundled with the original Macintosh and was the Mac’s default word processing program. MacWrite was developed by Randy Wigginton, Ed Ruder, and Don Breuner of Encore Systems. It defined the WYSIWYG word processing category and continued as freeware through version 5.0.
Photoshop began life as a program called Display that was made to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. Photoshop has grown to support layers, filters, brushes, text, 3D objects, video, and much others.
FileMaker Pro is a cross-platform (Mac OS and Windows) relational database (RDBMS) application published by Apple subsidiary FileMaker Inc.
Adobe InDesign was created as the successor to the aging Adobe PageMaker. InDesign supports features such as XHTML exporting, professional typographical controls, and long-document support. By 1998, much of the professional market had migrated from PageMaker to rival Quark XPress 4.1 due to PageMaker’s comparative lack of features. At that point, Quark announced that it […]
iTunes has grown from its roots as a program that let Mac users rip their CDs to MP3 format, manage their music libraries, and burn CDs. Today iTunes supports iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple TV, Apple’s online iTunes Store (which distributes music, podcasts, video, and software), and online video rentals.
Microsoft Word began life as Multi-Tool Word for Xenix in 1983. It was renamed Microsoft Word and ported to MS-DOS in 1983, the Macintosh in 1985, and Windows in 1989. It has been the dominant word processing program on the Mac since 1988 and on Windows since 1993.
