InstallSHIELD

In the latter half of 1990 when The Stirling Group was attending a Windows systems event they decided to take out an advert in Dr. Dobb's Journal advertising their line of current and upcoming products. The company had five products already shipping or at the end of development and nearing release and had a graphics designer make an advert with those five products, however when Viresh Bhatia took a copy of the advert to a local local printer to make leaflets out of it the printer did not like the asymmetry that the went with having a two row list of 5 products and said that it would look better if they were six.

Bhatia in a hurry decided to add a fictional product called InstallSHIELD to make up the six, but some sort of a generic installer program had been one of the product he and co-founder Harold had brainstormed about when originally trying to come up with products to develop, but had decided against it as something no-one would be willing to pay money for it, and they had not even went as far as to define what such a product would do exactly.

To everyone's surprise the only product anyone showed any interest either at the Windows Development show or in response to the Dr. Dobb's advert was the fictional InstallShield and the company even received firm orders for the product although no development of it was actually taking place. After querying developers at the show what exactly they were looking for in such a product the partners started work on an application that simplified the installation and de-installation process of software for developers and end users. In 1992 the company introduced the InstallShield product, initially for OS/2 and a little later for MS Windows, it became such an instant hit that they ceased the development of most of their other "Shield" products shortly thereafter with the exception of DemoShield and the company ended up renaming itself InstallShield Corporation.

Version

 * 1,0 (1992)
 * 2.0 (Mar 1994)