Star-Division

Star-Division logo

Star-Division was a software house from Lüneburg, Germany, founded in 1984 by Marco Börries. Well known for its software StarOffice, it was bought by Sun Microsystems on August 5th, 1999.

StarOffice itself developed from the StarWriter word processor, released for the CPC in 1985 and for DOS the year later. When Sun bought StarOffice, they released it as open source under the name OpenOffice, and continued to maintain their own version as StarOffice. The two are now the second most popular productivity suites for Windows, and the most popular for Linux.

After selling Star Division to Sun Microsystems for US$73.5 million in 1999, Marco Börries himself is now a multimillionaire. In Germany he is also known as "the German Bill Gates".

Releases for CPC

• Star-Writer (1985)
• Star-Mon (1986)
• Colour-Star (extra color commands for BASIC)
• Statistic-Star (business graphics)
• Fibu-Star (accounting software)
• Lager-Star (logistics software)
• Creator-Star (animation program)
• Designer-Star (painting program)
• Disksort-Star (disk management program)
• Copy-Star (printing program)
• Mouse Operating System (M.O.S.) (1987)

External links

• History at Wikipedia.de (in German)
• Sun StarOffice page