Quarterdeck Office Systems, later Quarterdeck Corporation (NASDAQ: QDEK), was an American computer software company. It was founded by Therese Myers and Gary Pope in 1981 and incorporated in 1982. Their offices were initially located at 150 Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, California and later at 13160 Mindanao Way in Marina Del Rey, California, as well as a sales and technical support unit located in Clearwater, Florida. In the 1990s they had a European office in Dublin, Ireland. Their most famous products were the Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager, DESQview, CleanSweep, DESQview/X, Quarterdeck Mosaic, and Manifest.
On April 18, 1989, Quarterdeck was awarded a US software patent that allowed multiple windowed PC applications under MS-DOS.
Quarterdeck undertook a number of acquisitions in the 1990s, leading ultimately to its failure in 1998 due to the collapse of the market for MS-DOS based utilities. In 1995 the company acquired of Landmark Research International Corp. for 3.5 million shares of Quarterdeck (acquiring MagnaRAM and WinProbe) and then Inset Systems, Inc. of Brookfield, Connecticut in September of that year for 933,000 shares of Quarterdeck (acquiring HiJaak graphics software in the deal).
Quarterdeck in 1997 then acquired Datastorm Technologies, Inc., publishers of PROCOMM and PROCOMM PLUS, and relocated its technical support and development operations from California and Florida, to Datastorm's Columbia, Missouri headquarters.
In 1998, with DOS utilities market all but collapsed, Quarterdeck was acquired by Symantec (the Norton Utilities company) who discontinued support of certain Quarterdeck products, e.g., Mosaic, or integrated them into larger offerings, e.g., CleanSweep, which became part of Norton SystemWorks.
Read more about Quarterdeck Office Systems: List of Software Products
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