Altsys Corporation was a

Texas Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...

-based software company founded by James R. Von Ehr II. It was an early

Apple Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

developer and publisher. Three major products from Altsys for PC / Macintosh and NeXT were: *

Fontographer Fontographer is a font editor for Windows and macOS; it is used to create digital fonts. It was originally developed by Altsys but is now owned by FontLab Ltd. History Altsys Corporation In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr II founded the Alt ...

for Windows and Mac OS - font editor * Font-O-Matic for Windows - font transformer * Virtuoso for NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and Solaris - vector editor (a version was announced, advertised and demonstrated for Windows NT, but never released) Altsys' best known product was basically a rebranded Virtuoso licensed to

Aldus Corporation Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing software. PageMaker, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing widesp ...

under the FreeHand name, was a vector drawing program that competed with Adobe Illustrator. It was published for many years, originally only on the Macintosh, then also for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. When Aldus was acquired by Adobe, the licensing agreement that Altsys had with Aldus precluded FreeHand from being part of the deal, so the publishing rights reverted to Altsys. Altsys also published Metamorphosis for Macintosh, a font utility. Altsys was acquired by

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc. was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Adobe Flash, Flash and Adobe Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its riv ...

in January, 1995. Von Ehr became a major Macromedia shareholder and joined the Macromedia board of directors.

References

External links

Altsys Metamorphosis
{Dead link, date=June 2020 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes Apple Inc. support article, circa 1990

- lists whole Altsys software line for Windows Macintosh software companies Defunct software companies of the United States