Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 472 Graphical User Interface Chaos
United States, Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale——Sunnyvale, Terry Opdendyk, President of VisiCorp——Terry Opdendyk dropped the newspaper in his hand annoyedly, and cursed in despair, "These shameless bastards , It’s okay to suppress us, but they even joined hands.”

The triumphant growth of the personal computer industry in 1982 is evidenced by two landmark events—on the public side, Time magazine's selection of the personal computer as Person of the Year, and on the business side, the success of Fangyuan Computer Corporation on the New York Stock Exchange. listed.

With the increase in the number of personal computers on the market, compared with the "one-off sale" of hardware, the ability of the software industry to attract money has become more and more apparent.

For example, the spreadsheet software war has risen from the simple market competition of various software companies to the confrontation of which product is the most powerful on the two platforms of Fangyuan personal computer and IBM-PC, which illustrates the important value of software.

It can easily achieve a huge profit of 60.00% and 70.00%, helping some software companies that seize the opportunity to quickly grow into the darling of the personal computer era with sales of more than tens of millions of dollars. VisiCorp is one of them.

It was originally called Personal Software—VisiCorp, a personal software company. When it was established in 1976, its main business was to sell a board game on the personal computer platform. The business model was similar to that of a book publisher.

After marrying with the spreadsheet software VisiCalc, VisiCorp's business conditions have undergone earth-shaking changes, and it has also attracted the favor of venture capital.

In order to obtain the exclusive distribution rights of VisiCalc from Dan Bricklin's Software Arts, the personal software company offered a commission of 30.00% to 50.00%, much higher than the industry's 12.00% to [-]% general market conditions.

With Don Estridge selecting VisiCalc as one of the troikas of IBM-PC platform business software and pre-installing it on IBM-PC, VisiCalc began to bring considerable profits to personal software companies and became mainstay of economic resources.

As a result, the personal software company finally simply changed the company name to VisiCorp, and even prefixed the names of other products with Visi.

From a marketing point of view, this approach has indeed produced good results.

But don't forget that the real owner of the spreadsheet software VisiCalc is Dan Bricklin's Software Art Company. A large part of VisiCorp's profits flow to Software Art Company. It is not an exaggeration to say that it has become the other party's wage earner.

For the sake of the glittering dollars, the two companies that had been cooperating closely began to have troubles, but the agreement was there. VisiCorp could not see a turning point to solve the problem for the time being, so it used the financial resources brought by VisiCalc to actively develop other software.

At the same time, VisiCorp, which has been completely controlled by venture capital, has become increasingly authoritarian in its management style. As a result, just like Atari in the past, it has become disorganized and disintegrated, and some important figures, including Mitchell Kapoor, have left one after another. .

When Mitchell Kapoor left VisiCorp, someone reminded Terry Opdenik that Mitchell Kapoor should sign a non-compete agreement, but Terry Opdenik wanted to save money , or simply said that out of disdain, he ignored this stubble.

As a result, after Mitchell Kapoor officially released Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet software with a new architecture, at COMDEX last year, it swept away other opponents on the IBM-PC platform, achieved dominance, and even had a challenge Confucian qualifications.

Terry Opdendick, who was slapped twice by the cruel reality, was ashamed as he could imagine.

Seeing VisiCorp's business performance take a sharp turn for the worse, Terry Opdendick was so anxious that he burned to death.

Just at this time, VisiCorp's investment in the field of graphical user interface has achieved obvious results.

So Terry Opdendic, like a drowning man hugging a floating log, bet all his wealth on VisiOn, a new product that has not yet been fully developed.

Not to mention, when a gambler named Terry Opdendike disregarded the risk and publicized VisiOn's semi-finished product, it really caused a huge sensation, even overshadowing the raging spreadsheet software war.

Many IT professional media, including "Byte", enthusiastically praised VisiOn, thinking that it is an operating system that is truly suitable for ordinary users, and instantly praised it as the number one in the field of graphical user interface.

A dog biting a man is not news, but a man biting a dog is news.

Although these IT media strive for the rigor of professional knowledge, they do their best to attract readers when reporting on industry trends.

Nowadays, microcomputer technology is advancing with each passing day, and the personal computer industry is booming. People who are interested in this field are also willing to see such lively and extraordinary content.

VisiOn just catered to this need, and VisiCorp was able to regain its foothold. Overjoyed, Terry Opdendick immediately launched a new set of product sales strategies.

However, this market-building move inevitably attracted the vigilance and rebound of Microsoft, Zheru, and Apple, which have their own plans for GUI applications.

In fact, VisiOn is not a completely independent operating system from bottom to top, it is an environment that runs on MS-DOS and provides a graphical user interface for applications, similar to the Fangyuan personal computer operating system. The graphical shell on FreeDOS, also known as the command line shell.

Or to describe it more accurately, VisiOn is very close to the 1990-bit operating system Windows 16.X running on MS-DOS in the early 3s in the original time and space—users need to manually start this graphical user by typing commands in the MS-DOS environment. interface.

This mode is not unique to Windows 3.X, and the operating mechanism of the graphical user interface system of another type of operating system Linux is similar.

Of course, VisiOn is definitely not as powerful as Windows 3.X.

But at this stage, Microsoft doesn't even mention Windows 3.X, and even Windows 1.0 has not yet been seen. Seeing that VisiOn is one step ahead on the IBM-PC platform, my eyes were red with anxiety.

(End of this chapter)