History of Macromedia

Macromedia was formed by the 1992 merger of Authorware Inc. (makers of Authorware) and MacroMind-Paracomp (makers of Macromind Director).

Director, an interactive multimedia authoring tool widely used to make CD-ROMs and information kiosks, was Macromedia’s flagship product until the mid-1990s. As the CD-ROM market began to decline and the World Wide Web gained in popularity, Macromedia created Shockwave, a Director viewer plugin for Web browsers, but decided it also needed to expand its market by branching out into web-native media tools.