Visi On
Encyclopedia
VisiCorp
's Visi On was a short-lived but influential graphical user interface
-based operating environment
program for IBM PC compatible
personal computer
s running early versions of DOS
. Although Visi On was never popular (as it had steep minimum system requirements for its day), it was a notable influence on the later development of Microsoft Windows
.
, and the corporate directors sat down and planned out their future directions. Ed Esber
introduced the concept of a "family" of products that could be sold together, but from a technical perspective none of their products were similar in anything but name. For instance, to use VisiPlot with VisiCalc data, the numbers to be plotted had to be exported in a "raw" format and then re-imported.
Dan Fylstra
led a technical discussion on what sorts of actions the user would need to be able to accomplish in order for their products to be truly integrated. They decided that there were three key concepts. One was universal data exchange, which would be supported by a set of common data structure
s used in all of their programs. Another was a common interface so users would not have to re-learn the UI as they moved from one program to another. Finally, Fylstra was concerned that the time needed to move from one program to another was too long to be useful – a user needing to quickly look something up in VisiDex would have to save and exit VisiCalc, look up the information, and then quit that and re-launch VisiCalc again. This process had to be made simpler.
announced the Xerox Star
workstation
, and by that point it was a well known "secret" that Apple Computer
was working on a low-cost version that would later be known as the Lisa
. Personal Software's president, Terry Opdendyk, knew of a two-man team in Texas
that was working on a simplified GUI, and arranged for Scott Warren and Dennis Abbe to visit Personal Software's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California
. They demonstrated a version of Smalltalk
running on the TRS-80
, a seriously underpowered machine, and the Personal Software people were extremely impressed.
A contract was soon signed, and work on "Quasar" started almost immediately. The name was later changed to Visi On, a play on "vision" that retained their "Visi" naming. A port to the ill-fated Apple III
was completed in November, and after that, development work shifted to a DEC VAX which had cross-compilers for a number of machines. In early 1982 Personal Software changed their name to VisiCorp, and was betting much of the future success of the company on VisiOn.
Visi On had many features of the modern GUI, even a few that did not become common until years later. It was fully mouse-driven, used a bit-mapped
display for both text and graphics, included on-line help, and allowed the user to open a number of programs at once, each in its own window. Visi On did not, however, include a graphical file manager. Visi On also demanded a hard drive in order to implement its virtual memory
system used for "fast switching", and at the time hard drives were a fairly rare piece of equipment.
show in 1982. Others in the company were worried that the product was not ready for shipping, and that showing it so early would leave potential customers and distributors upset if it wasn't ready soon after. Another concern was that VisiWord was being released at the same show, and there was some worry that it might be lost in the shuffle. Powers nevertheless got his way, claiming that IBM pre-announced products in order to drum up industry "buzz" and create a receptive market for when the product actually shipped.
The demonstrations at COMDEX were a huge success. Many viewers had to be told it was not simply a movie they were watching, and Bill Gates
speculated that the PC was in fact simply a terminal for a "real" machine like a VAX. The press rushed to write about the product in glowing terms, and it became one of the most talked-about products in the industry. However this very success led to a number of very serious problems.
For one, everyone seeing the product demanded to know the release date, forcing VisiCorp into announcing a summer '83 release. But even at this early date, developers within the company were well aware there was no way to release by that time. By early 1983 it appeared that fourth-quarter release would be the earliest that could be hoped for, and by that point the industry was already declaring it to be vaporware
investors, had an extremely autocratic management style that led to the departure of many key executives. From late 1981 to the eventual release of Visi On, most of the product management of the company left, notably Mitch Kapor
in charge of VisiCalc development, Ed Esber, Roy Folk, VisiOn's product marketing manager, among others. The press referred to this as "corporate civil war".
It was Mitch Kapor's departure that would prove most devastating to the company, however. Kapor, developer of VisiPlot and VisiTrend, had been pressing for the development of a greatly improved spreadsheet
, but Opdendyk was uninterested. This was during a time when VisiCorp and VisiCalc's developers were at an impasse, and VisiCalc was growing increasingly outdated. When Kapor decided to leave, the other executives pressed for a clause forbidding Kapor to work on an "integrated spreadsheet", but Opdendyk couldn't be bothered, exclaiming Kapor is a spaghetti programmer, denigrating his abilities.
Kapor would go on to release Lotus 1-2-3
, which became a major competitor to VisiCalc in 1983. By the end of the year, sales had been cut in half. Combined with the exodus of major portions of the senior executive staff and the ongoing battle with VisiCalc's developers, VisiCorp was soon in serious financial difficulty. All hopes for the company were placed on VisiOn.
, known as Visi On Applications Manager, sold for $495, and a required mouse for $295. Three applications were also released, the Visi On Calc spreadsheet
for $395, Visi On Graph for $250 and the Visi On Word word processor
for $375. The cost for a complete package was thus $1765.
However, the major cost in installing Visi On was the machine needed to run it. Visi On demanded at least 2.2 MB of hard drive space, meaning that the smallest common drive available was a 5 MB unit. Combined with the controller, this drove the cost of a complete Visi On install to about $7500, three quarter of the cost of the Lisa
.
The press continued to laud the product, going so far as to claim it represented the end of operating systems. The end-users were less impressed, however, not only due to the high cost of the required hardware, but also the general slowness of the system. In a market where computers were generally used for only one or two tasks, the whole raison d'être for Visi On was seriously diluted.
Only a month later, Apple Computer
released the Macintosh with much fanfare. Although the Mac was seriously lacking software, notably a spreadsheet, it was faster, cheaper, included a graphical file manager (the Finder
), and simply looked much better. Although it didn't compete directly with Visi On, which was really a "PC product", it nevertheless demonstrated that a GUI could indeed be fast and easy to use, both of which Visi On failed to deliver.
Adding to the release's problems was Bill Gates, who took a page from VisiCorp's book and announced that their own product, Microsoft Windows
, would be available in May 1984. This muddied the waters significantly, notably when he further claimed it would have a similar feature set, didn't require a hard disk, and cost only $250. Ironically, Windows was released with an even longer delay than VisiOn, only shipping in late 1985, and was lacking the features that forced Visi On to demand a hard drive.
Sales of Visi On were apparently very slow. In February 1985, VisiCorp responded by lowering the price of the basic OS to $99, knowing that anyone purchasing it would also need to buy the applications. These were bundled, all three for $990. This improved the situation somewhat, but sales were still far below projections, and it was certainly not helping the company stave off the problems due to Lotus 1-2-3.
Following declining VisiCalc sales and low revenues from Visi On, in November, 1985 the company merged with Paladin Software. The new company kept the Paladin name.
CPU
and DOS operating system; it is possible to run VisiOn on DOS 6.22, but it requires a special mouse, small partition and an XT computer. Visi On required 512 kilobyte
s of RAM and a 5 megabyte (or more) hard drive (FAT12 file system only, so maximum partition size must be 15MB). The software ran in CGA
640x200 monochrome graphics mode. It could work with multiple applications at the same time. It had built-in documentation and help files. Visi On required Mouse Systems
-compatible mice; Microsoft-compatible PC mice, which over the time became the standard, did not yet exist.
Visi On used two mouse drivers. First, loaded in text mode, made mouse registers accessible to the embedded driver, which translated coordinates to cursor position. This internal driver, built-in as a subroutine into VISIONXT.EXE, required Mouse Systems PC-Mouse pointing device. It was impossible to work using MS mouse because of protocol differences.
Visi On was targeted toward high-end (expensive) PC workstations. Visi On applications were written in a subset of C
VisiC, and a third-party could have ported the core software (VisiHost, VisiMachine virtual machine, VISIONXT.EXE in IBM PC DOS version) to Unix
, but that never occurred. In 1984, VisiCorp's assets were sold off to Control Data Corporation
.
Making working copies of the original floppy disks using modern methods is difficult - they are protected using pre-created bad sectors and other methods of floppy disk identification. However, Nathan Lineback has made Disk Images available. The legal status of these disk images is unknown.
VisiCorp
VisiCorp was an early personal computer software publisher. Its most famous products are VisiOn and VisiCalc.It was founded in 1976 by Dan Fylstra and Peter R. Jennings as Personal Software, and first published Jennings' Microchess program for the MOS Technology KIM-1 computer, and later Commodore...
's Visi On was a short-lived but influential graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
-based operating environment
Operating environment
The operating environment in engineering describes the circumstances surrounding and potentially affecting something that is operating. For example electronic or mechanical equipment may be affected by high temperatures, vibration, dust, and other parameters which comprise the operating...
program for IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s running early versions of DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
. Although Visi On was never popular (as it had steep minimum system requirements for its day), it was a notable influence on the later development of Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
.
Background
In the spring of 1981, Personal Software was cash-flush from the ever-increasing sales of VisiCalcVisiCalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool...
, and the corporate directors sat down and planned out their future directions. Ed Esber
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
introduced the concept of a "family" of products that could be sold together, but from a technical perspective none of their products were similar in anything but name. For instance, to use VisiPlot with VisiCalc data, the numbers to be plotted had to be exported in a "raw" format and then re-imported.
Dan Fylstra
Dan Fylstra
Dan Fylstra is a pioneer of the software products industry. In 1975 he was a founding associate editor of BYTE Magazine. In 1978 he co-founded Personal Software. Personal Software became the distributor of a new program called VisiCalc, the first widely used computer spreadsheet...
led a technical discussion on what sorts of actions the user would need to be able to accomplish in order for their products to be truly integrated. They decided that there were three key concepts. One was universal data exchange, which would be supported by a set of common data structure
Data structure
In computer science, a data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently.Different kinds of data structures are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to specific tasks...
s used in all of their programs. Another was a common interface so users would not have to re-learn the UI as they moved from one program to another. Finally, Fylstra was concerned that the time needed to move from one program to another was too long to be useful – a user needing to quickly look something up in VisiDex would have to save and exit VisiCalc, look up the information, and then quit that and re-launch VisiCalc again. This process had to be made simpler.
Creation
In July 1981 XeroxXerox
Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...
announced the Xerox Star
Xerox Star
The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based...
workstation
Workstation
A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems...
, and by that point it was a well known "secret" that Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
was working on a low-cost version that would later be known as the Lisa
Apple Lisa
The Apple Lisa—also known as the Lisa—is a :personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s....
. Personal Software's president, Terry Opdendyk, knew of a two-man team in Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
that was working on a simplified GUI, and arranged for Scott Warren and Dennis Abbe to visit Personal Software's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...
. They demonstrated a version of Smalltalk
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
running on the TRS-80
TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
, a seriously underpowered machine, and the Personal Software people were extremely impressed.
A contract was soon signed, and work on "Quasar" started almost immediately. The name was later changed to Visi On, a play on "vision" that retained their "Visi" naming. A port to the ill-fated Apple III
Apple III
The Apple III is a business-oriented personal computer produced and released by Apple Computer that was intended as the successor to the Apple II series, but largely considered a failure in the market. Development work on the Apple III started in late 1978 under the guidance of Dr. Wendell Sander...
was completed in November, and after that, development work shifted to a DEC VAX which had cross-compilers for a number of machines. In early 1982 Personal Software changed their name to VisiCorp, and was betting much of the future success of the company on VisiOn.
Visi On had many features of the modern GUI, even a few that did not become common until years later. It was fully mouse-driven, used a bit-mapped
Raster graphics
In computer graphics, a raster graphics image, or bitmap, is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium...
display for both text and graphics, included on-line help, and allowed the user to open a number of programs at once, each in its own window. Visi On did not, however, include a graphical file manager. Visi On also demanded a hard drive in order to implement its virtual memory
Virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory is a memory management technique developed for multitasking kernels. This technique virtualizes a computer architecture's various forms of computer data storage , allowing a program to be designed as though there is only one kind of memory, "virtual" memory, which...
system used for "fast switching", and at the time hard drives were a fairly rare piece of equipment.
COMDEX demo
Tom Powers, VisiCorp's new VP of marketing, pushed for the system to be demonstrated at the fall COMDEXCOMDEX
COMDEX was a computer expo held in Las Vegas, Nevada, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, usually second only to the German CeBIT, and by many accounts one of the largest trade shows in any industry sector...
show in 1982. Others in the company were worried that the product was not ready for shipping, and that showing it so early would leave potential customers and distributors upset if it wasn't ready soon after. Another concern was that VisiWord was being released at the same show, and there was some worry that it might be lost in the shuffle. Powers nevertheless got his way, claiming that IBM pre-announced products in order to drum up industry "buzz" and create a receptive market for when the product actually shipped.
The demonstrations at COMDEX were a huge success. Many viewers had to be told it was not simply a movie they were watching, and Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
speculated that the PC was in fact simply a terminal for a "real" machine like a VAX. The press rushed to write about the product in glowing terms, and it became one of the most talked-about products in the industry. However this very success led to a number of very serious problems.
For one, everyone seeing the product demanded to know the release date, forcing VisiCorp into announcing a summer '83 release. But even at this early date, developers within the company were well aware there was no way to release by that time. By early 1983 it appeared that fourth-quarter release would be the earliest that could be hoped for, and by that point the industry was already declaring it to be vaporware
Vaporware
Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially canceled. Vaporware is also a term sometimes used to describe events that are announced or predicted,...
Corporate civil war
While Visi On development continued, VisiCorp as an entity was in the process of self-destruction. Terry Opdendyk, the president hand-picked by the early venture capitalVenture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
investors, had an extremely autocratic management style that led to the departure of many key executives. From late 1981 to the eventual release of Visi On, most of the product management of the company left, notably Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor
Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...
in charge of VisiCalc development, Ed Esber, Roy Folk, VisiOn's product marketing manager, among others. The press referred to this as "corporate civil war".
It was Mitch Kapor's departure that would prove most devastating to the company, however. Kapor, developer of VisiPlot and VisiTrend, had been pressing for the development of a greatly improved spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
, but Opdendyk was uninterested. This was during a time when VisiCorp and VisiCalc's developers were at an impasse, and VisiCalc was growing increasingly outdated. When Kapor decided to leave, the other executives pressed for a clause forbidding Kapor to work on an "integrated spreadsheet", but Opdendyk couldn't be bothered, exclaiming Kapor is a spaghetti programmer, denigrating his abilities.
Kapor would go on to release Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software . It was the IBM PC's first "killer application"; its huge popularity in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC in the corporate environment.-Beginnings:...
, which became a major competitor to VisiCalc in 1983. By the end of the year, sales had been cut in half. Combined with the exodus of major portions of the senior executive staff and the ongoing battle with VisiCalc's developers, VisiCorp was soon in serious financial difficulty. All hopes for the company were placed on VisiOn.
Release
Visi On was released in December 1983, by some measure only a few months late. The basic operating systemOperating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, known as Visi On Applications Manager, sold for $495, and a required mouse for $295. Three applications were also released, the Visi On Calc spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
for $395, Visi On Graph for $250 and the Visi On Word word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
for $375. The cost for a complete package was thus $1765.
However, the major cost in installing Visi On was the machine needed to run it. Visi On demanded at least 2.2 MB of hard drive space, meaning that the smallest common drive available was a 5 MB unit. Combined with the controller, this drove the cost of a complete Visi On install to about $7500, three quarter of the cost of the Lisa
Apple Lisa
The Apple Lisa—also known as the Lisa—is a :personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s....
.
The press continued to laud the product, going so far as to claim it represented the end of operating systems. The end-users were less impressed, however, not only due to the high cost of the required hardware, but also the general slowness of the system. In a market where computers were generally used for only one or two tasks, the whole raison d'être for Visi On was seriously diluted.
Only a month later, Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
released the Macintosh with much fanfare. Although the Mac was seriously lacking software, notably a spreadsheet, it was faster, cheaper, included a graphical file manager (the Finder
Finder
Finder may refer to:* Finder , a core component of the Apple Macintosh operating system, is the graphical representation of the computer's file system* Finder , a comic book series by Carla Speed McNeil...
), and simply looked much better. Although it didn't compete directly with Visi On, which was really a "PC product", it nevertheless demonstrated that a GUI could indeed be fast and easy to use, both of which Visi On failed to deliver.
Adding to the release's problems was Bill Gates, who took a page from VisiCorp's book and announced that their own product, Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, would be available in May 1984. This muddied the waters significantly, notably when he further claimed it would have a similar feature set, didn't require a hard disk, and cost only $250. Ironically, Windows was released with an even longer delay than VisiOn, only shipping in late 1985, and was lacking the features that forced Visi On to demand a hard drive.
Sales of Visi On were apparently very slow. In February 1985, VisiCorp responded by lowering the price of the basic OS to $99, knowing that anyone purchasing it would also need to buy the applications. These were bundled, all three for $990. This improved the situation somewhat, but sales were still far below projections, and it was certainly not helping the company stave off the problems due to Lotus 1-2-3.
Following declining VisiCalc sales and low revenues from Visi On, in November, 1985 the company merged with Paladin Software. The new company kept the Paladin name.
Technical information
Visi On worked on IBM PCs that used an Intel 8086Intel 8086
The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and mid-1978, when it was released. The 8086 gave rise to the x86 architecture of Intel's future processors...
CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
and DOS operating system; it is possible to run VisiOn on DOS 6.22, but it requires a special mouse, small partition and an XT computer. Visi On required 512 kilobyte
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
s of RAM and a 5 megabyte (or more) hard drive (FAT12 file system only, so maximum partition size must be 15MB). The software ran in CGA
Color Graphics Adapter
The Color Graphics Adapter , originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, introduced in 1981, was IBM's first color graphics card, and the first color computer display standard for the IBM PC....
640x200 monochrome graphics mode. It could work with multiple applications at the same time. It had built-in documentation and help files. Visi On required Mouse Systems
Mouse Systems
Mouse Systems Corporation, formerly Rodent Associates, was founded in 1982 by Steve Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse. In addition to being a vehicle for Kirsch's invention, the company was responsible for bringing the mouse to the IBM PC for the first time.Like all early optical mice, their...
-compatible mice; Microsoft-compatible PC mice, which over the time became the standard, did not yet exist.
Visi On used two mouse drivers. First, loaded in text mode, made mouse registers accessible to the embedded driver, which translated coordinates to cursor position. This internal driver, built-in as a subroutine into VISIONXT.EXE, required Mouse Systems PC-Mouse pointing device. It was impossible to work using MS mouse because of protocol differences.
Visi On was targeted toward high-end (expensive) PC workstations. Visi On applications were written in a subset of C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
VisiC, and a third-party could have ported the core software (VisiHost, VisiMachine virtual machine, VISIONXT.EXE in IBM PC DOS version) to Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
, but that never occurred. In 1984, VisiCorp's assets were sold off to Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
.
Making working copies of the original floppy disks using modern methods is difficult - they are protected using pre-created bad sectors and other methods of floppy disk identification. However, Nathan Lineback has made Disk Images available. The legal status of these disk images is unknown.