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VisiCorp Visi On Screen Shots  I finally got my hands on a copy of VisiCorp Visi On! Very surprisingly the 20 year old disks were still readable! I was afraid the last readable copy had dropped off the face of the earth. Unfortunately it seems to have some very ugly copy prevention mechanism ("copy protection" in corporate newspeak) but I finally got it to run! (Mostly anyway). Sadly it will only run 100% correctly on a PC/XT because of hardware differences but I got it to mostly run on newer computers. Note: reportedly, the Central Point "Copy Board Deluxe" (A piece of hardware for PC/XT style machines) can successfully duplicate original Visi On floppy disks! For the sake of software preservation please click the links below: A Bootable 1.4 meg disk image of Visi On
with the tutorial and the word processor.
To use these you need the following:
IMPORTANT NOTE: As of MESS 0.131 the CHD hard drive image format has changed. Use the CHDMAN utility to convert the VisiMess.chd file for 0.131. Issue the command: "chdman -update VisiMess.chd VisiMessNew.chd" And use the new file instead. To set Visi On up under MESS: Download and unzip version 0.101 or later of MESS. Also download the needed BIOSes: IBMPC.ZIP and PC.ZIP you may also need IBM5150.ZIP. Copy these zip files in to the BIOS folder (still zipped). Unzip and copy the Visi On hard drive image in to the Software folder. Start the MESS GUI and start the "PC (CGA)" system. Mount the hard drive image as the first hard disk. Once you start the emulation, access the settings and change the Mouse Protocol from "Microsoft" to "Mouse Systems" (the location of this option varies). If a menu bar is visible at the top of the screen, press "Scroll Lock" on the keyboard to hide the menu and enable full keyboard and mouse operation in the emulator. Optionally, to make the display look better (not stretched and blurred) you can try fiddling with the video settings from the MESS GUI. For me using Direct 3D rendering at 640*400 looked perfect - but the settings that work best will vary from computer to computer. Notes: I had to apply an additional hack to the Visi On executable to work around a timing issue in MESS. Visi On (incorrectly) expected the interrupt pending bit of the Interrupt Identification Register to always be clear when checking the status at the beginning of its interrupt handler. This was not always the case, presumably due to MESS sending mouse data back to the emulated PC infinitely fast rather than letting it meander in at 1200 baud. For reference if needed, here is my version of Mess 0.100.1 with the Mouse Systems Mouse fix: mess1001_w95.zip This version is also slightly customized so it runs nicely under Windows 95.
What is VisiCorp Visi On?
The Visi On 1.0 files, interestingly, are dated December of 1983, the same month the "Microsoft 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 apparently not intended for the home user. It was designed and priced for high end corporate workstations. The hardware it required was 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 portable to other OSes such as CP/M or Unix, or to other CPUs besides the 8086. It did this by providing 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 environment 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 doesn't it? And Microsoft is only just now starting to re-write their Windows applications for their .net environment to help accommodate major CPU changes coming up in the future. Unfortunately, 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 encouraged to write applications for Visi On. At the time many companies tried to keep tight control on there development environments, but anyone with enough money and a Unix system could purchase a copy of the Visi On development environment. The Visi On GUI:
The Visi On Boot screen. With modern mice calibration is not necessary, all that is needed here is to just move the mouse. Original Mouse Systems mice had to be moved in circles several times to "calibrate" the sensitivity before they could be used. To properly run VisiCorp Visi On you must have a PC/XT with at least 512k of ram, MS-DOS 2.00 (or higher), A hard drive (or other large disk) formatted with the FAT12 file system, and the Visi On model S1 or model M1 mouse. Visi On will not run properly on a PC/AT (286) or later because Visi
On revectors several software interrupts that are used by IRQ 8-15 on these
machines. I disabled the revectoring and made the "VISIONAT.EXE" version
of the executable that will run on later machines, however these interrupts
are required by applications such as Visi On Graph. As a result Graph can
not run at all on newer machines but at least now the rest of the
software can more or less run.
Most modern mice are not Mouse Systems compatible. There are still some serial mice available in stores, however, that claim Mouse Systems compatibility. Many cheap 3-button serial mice from the 1990s had a switch on the bottom to switch between Microsoft and Mouse Systems PCMouse compatibility mode. If you have one of these just flip the switch and you are good to go. Some other serial mice that did not have this switch can be placed in Mouse Systems mode by holding down the first mouse button when the computer is powered on and/or during mouse initialization. Some other serial mice (especially cheap ones) used the same hardware but left out the switch, these can be set to Mouse Systems compatibility mode by connecting pin 3 to pin 8 of the IC chip if you know what your are doing. Some are also switchable using software but the methods for doing so can vary.
The entire Visi On suite consists of:
When Visi On starts, it displays the Services window. This windows lists all installed programs, and provides facilities for installing and removing software as well as configuring printers and managing drives. This window also has the "Exit" option to exit Visi On, however this is hidden by the default size of this window. To use it you must either resize the window, scroll the menu with the right mouse button, or use the keyboard to activate it. When you first Install the Visi On Application Manager the only installed program is the "Archives" utility. All others are installed separately.
HELP - Launches the built in help program and displays the help for
whatever object is selected.
This example shows a window being resized. This is done by clicking "Frame" then selecting the window to resize, selecting the upper left corner of the new window location, then selecting the lower right corner.
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