Other Maestros of the Micro

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Osborne needed only four months to build a prototype. He limited his designer to cheap, easily obtainable parts. It takes just 40 screws and 68 minutes to assemble an Osborne 1. Says a company executive: "We've out-Japanesed the Japanese." In fact, the Osborne is so successful that it is spawning imitators, some perhaps better than the original. Ever the optimist, Osborne is preparing to counter with a new portable. Asked about one possible rival from a new Texas firm, he replies, "We'll kill that machine dead, dead, dead."

Daniel Bricklin: Software = Hard Cash

The idea dawned on Daniel Bricklin in 1978, while he was looking blear-eyed at blackboards filled with columns of numbers during classes at the Harvard Business School. The professor would be engaged in one of those "what-if," or spread sheet, exercises in corporate financial planning for which the B School is famed. Every time a figure in one of the columns was changed, those in several other columns had to be recalculated as well. "Just one mistake on my calculator," recalls Bricklin, 31, "and I would end up moaning, 'My God, I got the whole series of numbers wrong!' "

That winter Bricklin, an M.I.T graduate and confessed computer "nerd" since his teens in Philadelphia, and an M.I.T. buddy, Bob Frankston, 33, worked day and night to develop a program for doing such number crunching on a small computer. The result was an electronic spread sheet: VisiCalc (visible calculator). Initially, VisiCalc got a lukewarm reception from computer stores. But when another B School grad, Daniel Fylstra, 31, who had just started up his own company, Personal Software Inc., stepped up the marketing, VisiCalc took off. Word began to get out about its enormous powers. With only a few presses of a computer's keys, VisiCalc could show what effects a change, say, an increase in salary for certain employees, might have on a company's costs, dividends and profits.

Some 400,000 copies of VisiCalc have been sold (retail price: $200 and up, depending on the version), making it the hottest piece of software, other than games, ever produce for the personal computer. It is also probably the most widely pirated and imitated (the rip-offs are nicknamed "VisiClones" and "CalcAlikes"). Sighs Bricklin: "I suppose if imitation is flattery, we've been flattered quite a bit." Headquartered in a refurbished chocolate factory in the Boston suburb of Wellesley, Mass., Bricklin's firm, Software Arts, now has more than 80 employees, as many computer terminals as phones, and excellent prospects (1982's revenues of $7 million were al most double the previous year's). Bricklin and his partner, Frankston, are planning a host of new computer software, including a math program called TK!Solver (after the proofreader's abbreviation for "to come"). They hope it will do for business and scientific models what VisiCalc does for spread sheets.

Jack Tramiel: Survivor's Victory