At this point the computer industry took an interesting turn. A former colleague from Pierce Data Systems called me up an invited me to dinner at his house. There he showed me this big metal and plastic box, almost the size of an end-table that he said was something called a “personal computer”. In the space of an evening, using this personal computer, we successfully prototypes something I had been working on for months on the mainframe. I quit IHS, and Gerry and I started a company selling and programming PCs.
Our first system used the Altos computer and the Oasis multi-user operating system. There were very few applications at that time. We partnered with Uveon Computer Systems who had creates the Optimum Database, which itself was a spin-off of the database and query language from the PICK Operating System. To that we programmed Opticalc – a database driven spreadsheet with enormous capacity – a maximum spreadsheet size of A-ZZZ columns, and up to 999 rows. Cells of different sheet could be linked together through formulas, and both source and results could be read from and written to the database. We launched in 1983, the same year that Lotus 1-2-3 came out with VisiCalc.
We never got the market penetration we wanted. The combination of the closing of Uveon and the launch of Microsoft Excel spelled the end of our spreadsheet.