T/Maker

~ the goodbye ~

The program came before the company. Peter Roizen wrote T/Maker in 1979, six months after VisiCalc, and it worked on a different principle: instead of burying a formula inside each cell, you declared the formulas along the margins, per row and per column. Tables could sit inside documents and be used as data at the same time, which made it an early attempt at what would later be sold as an office suite. Lifeboat Associates of New York distributed it.

T/Maker Company was incorporated in 1983 in Mountain View, with Peter's sister Heidi Roizen as chief executive. The Macintosh arrived the following january, and the company made a decision that turned out to be the whole business: it noticed that the Mac could do bitmapped graphics and that MacWrite could paste them, and that almost nobody using either could draw. ClickArt shipped in 1984, disks of small black and white images, hand-placed pixel by pixel by designers working on the machines themselves. Heidi Roizen later described the process as being close to needlepoint.

It was the fifth software title available for the Macintosh. T/Maker was also among the first companies selling fonts for it, and it published other people's software, including WriteNow, the word processor Apple had financed. Heidi and Royal Farros bought the company from Peter in 1986 and ran it on revenue rather than investment until 1989, when it became the first investment Hummer Winblad ever made and Ann Winblad joined the board. Tim Draper led a second round in 1993.

The clip art i grew up with came bundled, out of the gallery inside Microsoft Word, and it was free in the sense that somebody else had already paid for it. It never occurred to me that there had been a business in selling drawings by the boxful, or that the reason a gallery of stock images shows up inside every word processor is that a company in Mountain View proved in 1984 that people would buy them separately.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the box of drawings ~

What ClickArt sold was not art. It was permission. A document with a picture in it looked like it had been produced by somebody with a budget, and until 1984 getting a picture into a document meant either drawing it or paying someone. The Macintosh removed the technical barrier and ClickArt removed the talent barrier, and the immediate result was a decade of newsletters and school notices carrying the same borders and the same smiling sun.

That sameness is the interesting part. Because there was one dominant library, an enormous quantity of paper produced between 1985 and 1995 shares a visual vocabulary drawn by a handful of people nobody can name. It became the default look of amateur desktop publishing, and it is still legible as a period style, the same way a specific font is.

~ the sale ~

The unwinding started in march 1993, when the company sold WriteNow to WordStar International in order to concentrate on what Roizen called the electronic content market. Selling the word processor to fund the clip art business is a rational decision that also removes your reason to exist as a software publisher. A year later the company itself went.

Deluxe Corporation, a printer of bank checks, bought T/Maker in june 1994 for about $20 million against $15 million of sales. On paper this made sense: Deluxe printed things and T/Maker had a library of images to print. In practice the founders had a two-year horizon in it. Both left in 1996, Heidi Roizen to run worldwide developer relations at Apple and later a long career in venture capital, Royal Farros to found an online print shop. The remaining products were sold on to Broderbund, which kept the ClickArt name alive for years afterward.

~ what came after ~

The category ate itself. Microsoft started shipping a clip art gallery inside Office, then a much larger one online for free, and nobody was going to pay $49.95 for a disk of drawings when a thousand of them were already installed. Microsoft finally retired its own gallery in december 2014 and pointed people at image search, which closed the loop: the thing T/Maker invented as a product became a feature, then became a free service, then became a link to somebody else's pictures.

Peter Roizen never stopped. There is still a T/Maker site for a later version of the spreadsheet he wrote in 1979, run by the person who wrote it, decades after the company that carried the name was folded into a check printing business and taken apart.

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