History
The German company StarDivision in Lüneburg (founded by 16-year-old Marco Börries in 1984) wrote the original components of StarOffice. StarDivision developed the first version of StarWriter for the Zilog Z80 home-computer system, the Amstrad CPC (marketed by Schneider in Germany) under CP/M, and later for the Commodore 64 under Microsoft BASIC, which was later ported to the 8086-based Amstrad PC-1512, running under MS-DOS 3.2. Later, the integration of the other individual programs followed as the development progressed to an Office Suite for DOS, IBM'S OS/2 Warp, and for the Microsoft Windows operating-system. From this time onwards StarDivision marketed its suite under the name "StarOffice."
Until version 4.2, StarDivision based StarOffice on the cross-platform C++ class library StarView. In 1998 StarDivision began offering StarOffice for free.
Sun Microsystems acquired the company, copyright and trademark of StarOffice in 1999 for US$73.5 million. Sun wanted to compete with Microsoft Office, and also wanted to save money on licenses for Microsoft Office and Windows:
- The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop, and it was cheaper to buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft.
Read more about this topic: StarOffice
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