Ben Rosen's Reaction

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" height=50 BGCOLOR="#CCCC99" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="027000d2esnpes.gif"> <div> <B>Ben Rosen's Reaction</B></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=394 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B>"So who knows? Visicalc could some day become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog."</B></div> <bR> <div> Ben Rosen, one of the most major players in the PC world, who later went on to fund Lotus and Compaq, wrote this upon first seeing a sneak peek of VisiCalc in mid-1979. (The diskette he used, I believe, is in the Computer Museum collection, along with Bill Gates' papertape of Basic and other artifacts.) Ben was working at the time at Morgan Stanley, were he was an analyst about the semiconductor industry and later the PC industry. He ran a yearly conference. Sometime after this appeared he left Morgan Stanley to found a small business to publish the Letter and run the conference. When he became a venture capitalist he sold the business to Esther Dyson, who still runs it. What you see here are monochrome scans of a reprint we used at Software Arts. I tried to balance readability and size... (25Kb and 19Kb)</div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="02d58210.gif" border=0 width="600" height="801" ALT="Page 1 of Ben Rosen's Electronics Letter" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="02e58210.gif" border=0 width="600" height="801" ALT="Page 2 of Ben Rosen's Electronics Letter" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=36 BGCOLOR="#CCCC99" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="027000d2esnpes.gif"> <div> <A HREF="saincc.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="National Computer Conference"><U>< Previous Page</U></A>  <A HREF="saiproduct1.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The First Product"><U>Next Page ></U></A>  For more History see the book <A HREF="http://www.bricklin.com/bontech" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.bricklin.com/bontech"><U><I>Bricklin on Technology</I></U></A>.</div> <div> © Copyright 1999-2009 by Daniel Bricklin. All Rights Reserved.</div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>