Other Maestros of the Micro

Salesmen and seers, they are in the vanguard of the revolution

It took more than one man or one company, of course, to turn the personal computer into the engine that is powering a new communications revolution. Apple’s Steve Jobs is the most famous maestro of the micro, but other personalities played key roles in bringing about the Year of the Machine:

John Opel: Shaking Up the Giant

If any three letters can be considered synonymous with computers, they are IBM. Still the world’s dominant computer firm (and eighth largest industrial company in the U.S., with earnings of more than $3 billion in 1982), International Business Machines produces some 65% of the country’s mainframe business computers and an estimated 62% of those sold worldwide. But in one area IBM had long been conspicuously absent. Except for a brief, abortive fling in the mid-1970s at selling a small desktop machine called the model 5100 (cost: up to nearly $20,000), the corporation left the personal computer field to upstart firms like Apple and Tandy.

Now, under its aggressive new chief, John R. Opel, 57, IBM has launched itself in a new direction by marketing a small, low-cost personal computer. The creamy white PC (for personal computer), introduced in August 1981, has set a standard of excellence for the industry.

Even Opel finds it all a little amazing. Says he: “Who would have believed ten years ago that we’d have computers in the home?” With his professorial manner and horn-rimmed glasses—he is known as the Brain among colleagues—the mastermind of IBM’s policy shift hardly seems the sort to upset an Apple cart. The son of a hardware-store owner of German descent, Opel joined IBM in his home town, Jefferson City, Mo., in 1949 after studying at nearby Westminster College and getting an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. For ten years he ranged from the Ozarks to the Iowa border, selling IBM products so successfully that he was called to corporate headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., to become assistant to Tom Watson Jr., IBM’s president and son of its founder. Opel has been on the rise ever since, becoming president in 1974 and chief executive officer in 1981.

In an effort to get IBM out of a slump that had hit it in the late 1970s, Opel soon started shaking things up. The company began opening retail stores, not only to sell such staples as electric typewriters, but also to position it for a move into the fast-expanding personal computer field. In 1980 top management secretly gave the go-ahead to an engineering team, cloistered at a plant in Boca Raton, Fla., to begin designing a small computer (the project was code-named Acorn). Twelve months later, the PC was rolling off the production line. Breaking with tradition, IBM had used many non-IBM components: the TV monitor came from Taiwan, the printer from Japan and the microprocessor from Intel Corp., a major chipmaker in which IBM last week acquired a 12% interest for $250 million. The investment was one of the largest IBM has ever made in an outside corporation. Software for the PC was provided by outside suppliers as well. To IBM’s embarrassment, early users discovered that the PC misplaced decimal points in certain computations, a flaw quickly corrected. But Opel felt no need to be defensive. Said he: “We added real value to that machine, and we will add more as we go along. The performance characteristics are quite unique.” With PCs now selling at a brisker rate than ever, the marketplace apparently agreed that IBM had built the Cadillac of the 1982 class.

Adam Osborne: Plugging a Hole

As a gossipy and acid-tongued columnist in the trade press, Adam Osborne, 43, regularly charged the microcomputer industry with failing to innovate or serve consumer needs. Finally, in 1981 Osborne decided to produce his own personal computer. A year later the Osborne 1 appeared. Weighing only 24 lbs., it was packaged in a plastic case, could be tucked under an airline seat and carried a price tag of $1,795, including a valuable library of software. The erstwhile heckler had produced the first truly portable business computer.

Scoffers said that the box-shaped beast resembled a World War II field radio. But it had all the features of a higher-priced computer: a detachable keyboard, a screen (albeit only 5 in. diagonal), 64K of memory and two built-in disc drives to run and store programs. It also filled a need. Says Osborne: “I saw a truck-sized hole in the industry, and I plugged it.” Even Jobs, often a target of Osborne’s stings, professed admiration for his entrepreneurial talent.

Osborne was born in Bangkok to British parents; his father, a somewhat eccentric professor, spent much of his time trying to convert Christians to Hinduism. Osborne earned a doctorate in chemical engineering and worked for Shell Oil Co. before quitting to become a computer consultant and industry gadfly. His self-published book, An Introduction to Microcomputers, sold so well (300,000 copies) that he set up his own trade publishing company, which McGraw-Hill later bought.

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

There is no feistier figure in the personal computer business than Jack Tramiel, 54, president of Commodore International, whose PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) computer is the largest seller in Europe and one of the big four in the U.S. along with Apple, Radio Shack and IBM. Unwilling to be trammeled by cheaper imports, he called together investors a few years ago and said, “Gentlemen, we must build and sell a color computer for under $300.” When the investors balked, Tramiel pounded the table and said that if they did not produce such a machine, the Japanese would. The result of that Tramiel browbeating is Commodore’s VIC 20 (list price: $299, but avail able for as little as $170), one of the most widely sold computers ever built.

The dynamo behind the little machine is something of a mighty mite himself. Short (5 ft. 4 in.) and stocky, the Polish-born Tramiel is hot-tempered, keeps his executive echelons in turmoil, avoids photographers (colleagues have dubbed him “the Howard Hughes of computer dom”) and calls himself a “graduate survivor.” During World War II he was sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz. After Soviet troops liberated the death camp, he worked for the U.S. Army repairing type writers. Then he went into business on his own, eventually getting into the manufacture of pocket calculators.

Tramiel believes in depending on as few outside suppliers as possible. Commodore makes its own chips to avoid being caught in a supply or pricing crunch. A ferocious competitor, Tramiel once splashed full-page ads in major newspapers across the U.S. that proclaimed, COMMODORE ATE THE APPLE. For several years, to capture the important education market, he offered schools two PETs for the price of one.

In September the Norristown, Penn., firm brought out its latest small computer, the Commodore 64. It lists at $595, less than half the price of the Apple II Plus, but comes with a third more memory.

Tramiel believes he has still more aces up his sleeve. At January’s big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, Commodore plans to show off a new voice-synthesis device that will enable users of its computers to create speech.

Clive Sinclair: Small Is Beautiful

Ever since he was a youngster in England, Clive Sinclair, 42, has had big thoughts about little things. At twelve, he built small mechanical calculators. At 22, after a brief stint as a science writer and editor specializing in home electronics, Sinclair and his wife Anne set up a mail order house selling transistors and later kits for miniradios no bigger than match boxes. In the 1970s he made one of the earliest pocket calculators with advanced mathematical functions, designed a pioneering, inexpensive digital wristwatch, and introduced a tiny TV with a 2-in. screen. Ahead of their time, none survived very long.

But the balding, bearded and largely self-taught Sinclair (he passed up the uni versity) kept thinking small. In 1980 he introduced the world’s littlest and cheapest personal computer, the Sinclair ZX80. Last September a more sophisticated version of the ZX80 made its debut in the U.S. as the Timex Sinclair 1000 (list price: $99). Since then, the 12-oz. units have been in a race with Commodore for top spot in worldwide computer sales.

Although it has only a minuscule memory (2K) and nothing more than pressure points for keys, Sinclair’s mini-micro has opened the doors to computing for thousands of novices. It is powerful enough to handle family budgets, do math homework and play simple games. Available at discount for as little as $77.95, it has even won plaudits from the makers of higher-priced rivals. Reasons an Apple spokesman: “After people operate it for a while and find computers aren’t threatening, they’ll move up.”

Determined as ever to make it in the small world, Sinclair plans to bring out another tiny TV, this one only slightly bigger than a pack of cards. Its ingenious flattened tube will later be built into his computer, thereby eliminating the need to hook it up to an external monitor. Sinclair, who relishes racing around in his two Porsches, is also trying to develop an electric car for slow (30 m.p.h.) urban driving—mini-size, of course. Nowadays he spends far fewer hours in his company’s labs in Cambridge than he once did. Says Sinclair: “Much of my work consists of thinking, and that can be done anywhere, including bed.”

—By Frederic Golden