- Why FileMaker? (Part 2)
- We continue our quest to anser the question, Why FileMaker. We take a brief look at the origins of the hugely popular Database system.
WHAT ARE IT’S ORIGINS?
FileMaker started out life in Massachusetts in the early 1980’s. The four founders, Spec Bower’s, Alan Albert, Dan Chadwick and Jega Arulpragasm, who were at the time working for Wang Labs (a word processing developer), looked at the database market and found it sadly lacking.
In 1983 they split from Wang Labs and setup Nashoba Systems, starting first from their homes and later in rented office space in Concord, Massachusetts.
The first product that came out of Nashoba Systems was called Nutshell and was developed for PC’s and marketed through a company called Leading Edge. Shortly after Nutshell was released, Macintosh came on the scene, developed by Apple. At the time, Leading Edge would not deal with the Mac market so Nashoba released FileMaker to market to Macintosh. Nashoba hired a company called Forethought to market FileMaker for the Mac market.
After a period of financial difficulty for both companies, Nashoba and Forethough went on to form a partnership style publishing agreement and FileMaker quickly rose to become a best selling database.
In 1987, Microsoft acquired Forethought for $14 million, probably in an attempt to gain the publishing rights to FileMaker. Microsoft failed in this endeavor however they got PowerPoint as a conciliation prize. Microsoft offered Nashoba a royalty deal of $75,000 a month for the publishing rights to FilMaker but as the database system was, at the time, making over $6 million per annum Nashoba decided to decline Microsoft’s and instead go down the path of self publishing.
In 1988 after some serious inhouse power struggles, resulting in the split of one of the founding members, Nashoba was acquired by Claris, a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple. Later Apple dissolved Claris and setup the FileMaker Inc which we know and love today.
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