In the early 1990s, a small American company called Data Translation took what it knew about coding and decoding pictures for the US military and large corporate clients and spent $12 million developing a desktop editor based on its proprietary compression algorithms and off-the-shelf parts. Their aim was to democratize the desktop and take some of Avid's market. In August 1993, Media 100 entered the market, providing would-be editors with a low-cost, high-quality platform.[citation needed]