Lighthouse Design

The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner, in Bethesda, Maryland.

In the early 1990s, Sun Microsystems entered a major partnership with NeXT to develop OpenStep, essentially a cross-platform version of the "upper layers" of the NeXTSTEP operating system.

Sun planned a distributed computing environment, with users running OpenStep on the desktop, and the transaction processing occurring on servers in the back-office.

[citation needed] In mid-1996, Sun purchased Lighthouse for $22 million,[3] turning them into their in-house OpenStep applications group.

At the time, Scott McNealy had visions of turning Sun into a powerhouse that would compete head-to-head with Microsoft, and an office applications suite was a requirement for any such plan.

The only problem with this move was that any attempt to port Lighthouse's OpenStep applications written in Objective-C to Java would be almost impossible.

Sun eventually gave up on the idea, if it ever entertained it seriously in the first place, abandoning the office application market for many years.