Because of the similarities with Adobe Illustrator, the Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint in October 1994 ordering a divestiture of FreeHand back to Altsys. Altsys was the developer of the vector-drawing program FreeHand, which had been licensed by Aldus for marketing and sales. In January 1995, Macromedia acquired Altsys Corporation after Adobe Systems announced a merger with Altsys' business partner, the Aldus Corporation. By 2002, Macromedia produced more than 20 products and had 30 offices in 13 countries. Macromedia licensed Sun's Java Programming Language in October 1995. The first multimedia playback in Netscape's browser was a Director plug-in. Macromedia created Shockwave, a Director-viewer plugin for web browsers. As the Internet moved from a university research medium to a commercial network, Macromedia began working to web-enable its existing tools and develop new products like Dreamweaver. Authorware was Macromedia's principal product in the interactive learning market. (makers of Authorware) and MacroMind–Paracomp (makers of Macromind Director).ĭirector, an interactive multimedia-authoring tool used to make presentations, animations, CD-ROMs and information kiosks, served as Macromedia's flagship product until the mid-1990s. Macromedia originated in the 1992 merger of Authorware Inc. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems on December 3, 2005. Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver.