The "PrintShop" Saga
PrintShop and BroderBund - The Early Days
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Broderbund was founded by Doug and Gary Carlston in 1980, when the personal computer software industry was still in its infancy.
The brothers established the company in order to market computer game programs Doug had written in his spare time when he wasn't practicing law. Before the end of its third year, Broderbund had had grown to more than 40 employees and was selling millions of dollars' worth of software annually. |
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In December 1987, in "The Official PrintShop Handbook" (Bantam), Doug Carlston, still President of Broderbund, wrote "We never expected that The PrintShop would become one of the precursors to a whole new category of software applications referred to as desktop publishing." |
Pixellite Software and The PrintShop
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"When David Balsam and Marty Kahn first showed us an early version of a program later to be called The PrintShop, we were struck with the extraordinary creativity it permitted even the most artistically hopeless of us." - Doug Carlston, President, Broderbund Software, 1987. |
Was Pixellite Software owned by David Balsam and Marty Kahn? Pixellite Software certainly held the Copyrights for The PrintShop.
What happened to Pixellite Software?
On May 31, 1995, Sierra On-Line merged with The Pixellite Group ("Pixellite"), a developer of personal printing software, in exchange for 245,779 shares of Sierra's Common Stock.
Known in the late '70s as On-Line Systems, company founder Ken Williams took on the task of programming Roberta Williams' hand-written game concept into the first graphic-text adventure game ever created. On-Line Systems became Sierra On-Line in 1980. The following years brought many successes. By fiscal year 1995 (ending March 31, 1995), revenues exceeded $80 million and Sierra's staff grew to more than 700 employees. 1995 saw a number of acquisitions, primarily in the home productivity genre.
"In May (1995), Sierra purchased the rights to Print Artist, a program that enables users to quickly and easily create and print their own professional-quality documents."
Was Print Artist written by Pixellite?