Sorcim Corporation was an early start-up company in Silicon Valley, founded in June 1980 by Richard Frank, Paul McQuesten, Martin Herbach, Anil Lakhwara, and Steve Jasik - all former Control Data Corporation employees working in the Language Group in Sunnyvale, CA. Jasik left company early on, to develop the MacNosy product for the Macintosh.
Sorcim was best known for SuperCalc, a spreadsheet the company developed for the Osborne Computer Corporation portable computer. The company made many other products, including SuperWriter and SuperProject before its acquisition by Computer Associates in 1985. Although the company continued as a largely autonomous division of CA, it never again achieved prominence after the acquisition.
The company was named "Sorcim" after Richard Frank saw a reflection of the word “micros” in an airplane window.
Early history The company was founded to expand the microcomputer products from Digicom, a company formed by Richard in 1978. Paul joined in 1979. The Digicom software programs ran on the CP/M operating system using the Intel 8080, 8085 and later the 8086, Zilog Z80 and the Z8000. The company's early products included Pascal/M, and ACT - a set of cross assemblers including one for the Atari (8080) and the Commodore PET (6502).
In these early days of the company, and before the introduction of the IBM PC and MS-DOS, Sorcim used Godbout S100 bus CP/M machines for development; these machines were fast and the people at Godbout were competent hardware developers. Bill Godbout was one of the first commercial accounts for Sorcim, supporting the company's cross assemblers and Pascal/M. In fact at one time Godbout helped relieve a short-term cash flow problem by doing a one-time buy of development tool products. "Bill was one of those people who always provided you an honest opinion (sometimes to the dismay of Sorcim managers) and great Friday lunch meetings."
The birth of SuperCalc In 1980 at one of the local monthly computer industry poker parties, Bill Godbout introduced Richard Frank to Adam Osborne. Lee Felsenstein was developing the industry's first portable computer for Adam Osborne's new company, and he needed a CP/M BIOS.A computer in every hand, July 17, 1999, By David Pescovitz, Salon People Rewind Archived version This computer was released as the Osborne 1.
In late Fall of 1980, Adam was looking for a spreadsheet for the Osborne 1. His efforts to acquire rights to VisiCalc were disappointing, so he asked Sorcim if they would be interested in developing a spreadsheet that would be competitive with VisiCalc, and develop it in time to showcase it at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981. The company accepted the challenge, working days on contract programming (a CHILL compiler for Siemens) and nights on the Osborne BIOS and SuperCalc. With Martin Herbach as the lead architect, the company hired Gary Balleisen, as the lead developer, to implement a demo version of the application.
The product was introduced in April 1981 at the West Coast Computer Faire in the Osborne booth. The enthusiastic reception surprised the Sorcim folks. SuperCalc was written in assembly code using Sorcim's ACT assembler. Eventually SuperCalc was ported to over 150 different hardware platforms - from the Osborne 1 to the Zenith Z89. By the 18-month mark, the company had sold over 250,000 copies of the original SuperCalc. During this period, the company estimated that VisiCalc's market share was about 85% and SuperCalc was about 15%. There were some other early spreadsheet programs, but these two programs shared essentially the entire market.
Executive restructuring Toward the end of 1982, the founders had become dissatisfied with company management. They removed the company president and each founder took on an acting VP role: Herbach ran Sales, Lakahara was responsible for software development, McQuesten supervised Finance, and Frank was CEO and Chairman. Despite this, the founders were unhappy in these roles and they were actively looking for a new president to guide the company's growth. SuperCalc2, SuperWriter, and SuperChart, which were all announced in November 1982, had no concrete ship dates, and a census of projects in the company showed that the development staff of about 20 people was working on over 100 projects. This was whittled down to the main applications and development tools.
At this time, the company made its first serious effort to establish control over the products, and Greg Resnick (who came aboard with the SpellGuard acquisition) became Product Manager of SuperWriter, while new hire Walter Feigenson came in to manage SuperCalc.
The founders were still actively looking for a new leader during the early part of 1983. They had interviewed a number of candidates for CEO, but none were considered acceptable. They coalesced around Jim Pelkey, who had started consulting for the founders in late 1982. Pelkey was introduced to the company by Jack Melchor of Melchor Venture Management to help management create a strategic plan. Melchor was an early investor in ROLM, Software Publishing, 3Com, The Learning Company. He was the only outside investor in Sorcim, and a member of the board.
Pelkey was appointed President in May 1983, followed by George Wikle as CFO. Bill Ferguson, was hired from MicroPro (the makers of WordStar) as VP of Sales, and Steve Goldsworthy joined from HP as VP of engineering. Ron Grubman was recruited as VP of corporate development in the summer of 1983, and the team was rounded out by Hal King, who was hired as VP of marketing.
The company makes plans to move beyond CP/M SuperCalc2 shipped April 15, 1983 for CP/M machines, and a month later for CP/M-86 machines. Sales continued at a healthy upward pace, despite strong competition from Lotus 1-2-3. VisiCalc sales essentially dried up, and Sorcim management believed that SuperCalc maintained its 15% market share in a rapidly growing market.
With the new management team coming together, the team focused on aggressively growing the company to maintain market visibility and power, respond to the phenomenon of Lotus 1-2-3, create a "killer app" for the IBM PC, solve the constraints of a thin capitalization and remain profitable.
The marketing challenge was to create a solid relationship with IBM while generating as much revenue as possible from existing products. Simultaneously, the staff was tasked with evolving beyond a CP/M company. Work began on a new "killer" product that was to become SuperCalc3.
Although well known because SuperCalc was one of the three products packaged with the Osborne I CP/M "luggable" computer. Sorcim had no new product offerings for the IBM PC. SuperCalc for MS-DOS was functionally the same product as the CP/M version, which was typical for all established products at this time. Lotus 1-2-3 was a notable exception. Sorcim failed to change focus from CP/M, where the company had almost 100% market share, to DOS, where SuperCalc simply maintained its market share.
New management establishes future directions The engineering organization was divided into three major efforts:
Maintain the current products including ports to new OEM computers, Create SuperCalc3, and Invest in a skunkworks effort that would lead to products beyond SuperCalc3.
The capital structure constraints required the company to become profitable, again attain market growth and to create an exciting business plan for the future; all aimed at raising a new capital round in the early part of 1984.
It seemed important to demonstrate that the new team was in control, since so many startups falter when the founders don't hand over full control to their new management teams. So while the new team came together, Richard Frank and Paul McQuesten moved a few blocks away to an office called "The Farm." Nobody knew the location or their phone number. There were two purposes: 1) to give the new team some breathing room, and 2) to start work on a new version of a multifunction product that was code-named Oyster. Richard, Paul, and Jeff McKenna bought a Symbolics LISP machine so they could start rapid prototyping of new products. This work had previously been done on paper and at white boards.
In fact, there was another project going on to define this product—a kind of skunkworks team composed of Martin Herbach, Dave Montagna (also of CDC Fortran compiler fame), and Walter Feigenson. This team got pretty far into defining what would have been a windowing system based on technology they had acquired from Payment Pouladdej and Peter Fiore—a system that appeared very similar to GEM, which was being developed by Digital Research (much to the chagrin of Payment and Peter who had shown it to Digital Research before joining Sorcim). This project died when Computer Associates acquired Sorcim.
By the time SuperCalc2 shipped in April 1983, Sorcim knew that its competitor was no longer VisiCalc, but Lotus 1-2-3, which became an instant best seller in February 1983. Besides being technically excellent, 1-2-3 also had a substantially larger marketing budget than Sorcim's. As a marketing reply to this juggernaut, Sorcim crafted plans to add the features of SuperChart to the DOS version of SuperCalc, and this became SuperCalc3, which shipped in September 1983. SC3 was introduced at the CP/M show in Boston in 1983. Although some thought this venue an odd choice, Sorcim still thought at that time that it could make a "universal" version of SuperCalc3 for any CP/M machine. This turned out to be impractical because CP/M-86 did not function to hide the hardware level from the application software.
At the Boston show, many industry people paid attention to Sorcim's booth, including Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development, the 1-2-3 company. SuperCalc was effectively the only competition to 1-2-3 at that point, and SC3 was vastly superior to 1-2-3 in its graphics. When Product Manager Walter Feigenson showed Kapor the product for the first time, Mitch was astounded that SC3 could do everything it did from a single disk. He even remarked that he had to reprogram 1-2-3 in Assembler to get its speed - and he wanted to know how Martin Herbach had managed to get the C-coded graphics engine to work in the middle of a non-relocatable Assembler program.(That remains a bit of unknown magic to this day.) By all accounts, Martin had achieved the impossible. SuperCalc's graphics were on a par with dedicated graphics programs (it won 3rd place in the National Software Testing Labs graphics programs competition in 1984). But good graphics weren't enough to supplant 1-2-3, and in fact the company learned that 1-2-3 users weren't even printing their graphics, since the cable for the only low-cost pen plotter was wired incorrectly.
It's interesting to note that Microsoft also had a spreadsheet (MultiPlan) at this time, but the main competitors for the King of Spreadsheets remained SuperCalc3 and later versions, and 1-2-3 in its upgraded versions. Microsoft eventually abandoned MultiPlan in favor of Excel.
SuperCalc3 porting sales Sorcim was very successful at selling an OEM CP/M version of SuperCalc2, and sales for 1983 zoomed to $7M including the upfront OEM payments. These were not "porting contracts," since CP/M machines all executed the same code and used one of the 100+ standard terminals Sorcim products supported. The only difference in versions was the disk size and recording format. After SC3 shipped, the company began a successful campaign to port this graphical version to IBM "compatibles" (which mostly weren't 100% compatible at that time). At the same time, the company created a corporate sales organization. By early 1984, DOS sales dominated, and CP/M sales had eroded, and our efforts to get IBM to minimally endorse us - as they had endorsed Microsoft and Lotus – failed. Sales to businesses were not advancing fast enough to fund our efforts.