Lighthouse Design

Lighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner, in Bethesda, Maryland. Lighthouse later moved to San Mateo, California. In 1996, Lighthouse was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

Two of the first products developed at Lighthouse were Diagram! and Exploder.

Diagram! was a drawing tool, originally called BLT (for Box-and-Line Tool) in which objects (boxes) are connected together using "smart links" (lines) to construct diagrams such a flow charts.

Exploder was a programming tool for storing Objective-C objects in a Relational database. Lighthouse marketed Diagram! directly, and in 1991 spun off the Exploder into a new startup, Persistence Software. Persistence Software went public with an IPO on June 25, 1999.

Lighthouse went on to develop and acquire more software products, and marketed an office suite for NeXTSTEP, which included ParaSheet (a traditional spreadsheet), Quantrix (a spreadsheet program based on Lotus Improv), Diagram!, TaskMaster (a project management program), WetPaint (an image editing/retouching program), LightPlan (an OMT-based computer data modeling tool, based on Diagram!), and Concurrence (a presentation program).

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