Visi On

VisiCorp Visi On

Note: This page is still "under construction" I plan to replace the screen shots below with images from the manuals when I get them scanned in.

About VisiOn:

The UI was primitive compared to today.
It was very, very expensive.
The disks were copy "protected".
It required too much harware for the time (1983).
It was never popular.
...
but
...
It WAS the first full featured GUI for the IBM-PC.
And it pissed off Bill Gates.

I finally got my hands on a copy of VisiCorp VisiOn! Unfortunatly it seems to have some very ugly copy prevention mechinisim ("copy protection" in corporate newspeak). Anyone want to take a stab at cracking this?

Download the files here:
Visi On Application Manager (the GUI)
Visi On Accessories (bundled with Application Manager)
Visi On Graph (Graphing program)
Visi On Word (Word proccessing program)
Visi On Calc - Sorry, still missing! (Note: This is NOT VisiCalc)

Obsticles to getting it running:

During install it checks to see if it is installing from an authentic Visi On floppy disk. I tried CopyIIPC and that could not copy it correctly.
Installing permanantly writes setup configuration information to an uncopyable area of the origional floppy disk.
The manual indicates it requires the Visi-On mouse to run. Reportely old Logitec mice are Visi-On compatible and Mouse Systems mice may also work, but I don't know for sure.
More specifically the manuual says it either needs

A Visi-On mouse with a software readable serial number in the hardware, and once installed you can only use your copy with that mouse.
A Visi-On mouse with no serial number in the hardware, and once insalled you must always have the Application Manager disk 1 in the drive so it knows you are running an authentic copy.

Was designed for IBM PC, IBM PC/XT, Compaq Portable Computer, and Honeywell Series 7900 computers running MS-DOS 2.0. It has been reported that it may have problems running on other systems, and does direct BIOS level hard disk IO that causes it to requires a fat-12 (16mb or less) hard disk partition.
A functional mouse pointer is probably required to navigate the GUI.

If anyone gets it to work, please let me know!

What is VisiCorp Visi On?
VisiCorp Visi On was the first full featured desktop GUI for the IBM PC. Legend has it Bill Gates saw a demo of this running at the 1982 comdex running on an IBM PC. He freaked out because Microsoft didn't have anything like this yet, ran back to Microsoft Headquarters, and had them start work on what became Windows.

The VisiOn 1.0 files, interestingly, are dataed December of 1983, the same month the "Micrisoft Windows" article appeared in Byte Magazine. As we know Windows 1.0 was not released until 1985. If this was an attempt to keep people away from Visi On it worked. In august 1984 Visicorp sold Visi-On to Control Data Corp, where it was apparently never heard from again.

The Visi On product was obviously not indended for the home user. It was designed (and priced) for high end corporate workstations.

$495 - The Application Manager (The GUI).
$250 - The required Visi-On mouse
$395 - Visi On Calc
$375 - Visi On Word
$195 - Visi On Graph

Remember, this was in 1983. Needess to say Microsoft and Apple were very happy about these prices. They arn't worth squat now.

The harware it required was also quite a bit for 1983. It required a minimum of 512k of ram and a hard drive (5 megs of space).

A very interesting feature of Visi On is the way it was designed. It was designed to be portible to other OSes such as CP/M or Unix, or to other CPUs besides the 8086. It did this by prividing a kind of non machine specific "virtual machine" (called the Visi Machine) that all applications were written for. Only the very core of Visi On (called the Visi Host) was machine specific.

Applications were developed in "Visi C", a fairly restricted subset of C designed for maximum portability. The development environemnt was Unix based and included a non-graphical version of the Visi-Host that let portions of Visi-On applications be run and tested on Unix.

Sounds kind of like Java dosn't it? And Microsoft is only just now starting to re-write their Windows applicaitons for their .net environemt to help accomodate major CPU changes comming up in the future.

Unforutantly, aside from the incomplete Visi Host included with the development software, Visi On was never ported to any other platform besides IBM PC compatibles running MS-DOS.

Another unique aspect of Visi On was that outside developers were encuraged to write applications for Visi On. At the time many compaines tried to keep tight control on there developement environements, but anyone with enough money and a Unix system could purchace a copy of of the Visi On development environemnt.

Consistan user interface
mouse/text mode/no icons

featues:
copy paste
Unix is a great program development environment. While not
competing in that area, Visi On corrects some of the basic
flaws in Unix. I already mentioned that Visi On has a bit
mapped screen/mouse model of interaction. More importantly the
Visi On environment improves on the Unix shell in that programs
can pass typed structured data. Currently the only exotic
data type that I know of is spread sheet format, but if I
decide my activity wants to import and export LPC encoded
speech I can register my structure with Visi Corp and other
applications may or may not accept it. While this is not as
exotic as one might find on a Lisp machine it is practical and
efficient as the types are checked at installation time.

Application programs (Activities in Visi-Jargon)

reporteldy had an open development enviornment while star and lisa kept theios to themselves.

VisiOn apps compeated with DOS apps such as visicalc, visiword, and visiplot