Word: bricklins
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...Daniel Bricklin, 29, and Robert Frankston, 31, a team of new-wave composers, have penned a dynamite disc that has grossed an estimated $8 million. It is not a punk-rock smash, but an unmelodic magnetic number called VisiCalc, the bestselling microcomputer program for business uses. The featherweight sliver of plastic is about the size of a greeting card, but when it is placed in a computer, the machine comes alive. A computer without a program, or "software," is like a $3,000 stereo set without any records or tapes...
Three years ago, Bricklin, then a first-year Harvard Business School student, conceived VisiCalc while struggling with financial-planning problems on his calculator. He enlisted the aid of Frankston, a longtime friend and an expert programmer, to develop a new piece of computer software that would make juggling all those figures easier...
Safety Cage. Bricklin thought he could succeed by selling a car engineered primarily for safety. The Bricklin had retractable bumpers designed to absorb collisions without damage at speeds up to ten miles per hour, roll bars that made the passenger compartment a kind of safety cage, and gull-wing doors that opened by swinging up and out of the way of oncoming traffic. Those features were expensive: the car's price rose from about $8,000 in 1974 to $10,000 this year. Bricklin tried to give the car flash as well as safety appeal; he made only...
However, nothing went quite right with the car from the start. The two plants, which employed 600 people, were expected to produce 12,000 vehicles a year; but over the Bricklin's entire production run, beginning in August 1974, they turned out only 3,000 cars-most of them exported to the U.S. One trouble was that the Bricklin's gull-wing doors were electrically operated -and sealed in passengers if the battery ran dead. Some Bricklins arrived at dealers' with missing parts and simply could not be sold. Deliveries to Bricklin's 400 dealers were...
...receiver, Clarkson Co. Ltd., an accounting firm, will determine over the next several weeks whether the company can be reorganized. The odds on the Bricklin car rising Phoenix-like, however, are poor. Bricklin claimed last week to have lined up more than $10 million from new U.S. investors, and earnestly solicited an additional $10 million to $15 million from the New Brunswick provincial and Canadian federal governments. But Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's administration is cutting its budget to attack inflation and is in no mood to boost new spending. New Brunswick's Progressive Conservative premier, Richard Hatfield...