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.

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.

"[citation needed] In 1980 at one of the local monthly computer industry poker parties, Bill Godbout introduced Richard Frank to Adam Osborne.

The company accepted the challenge, working days on contract programming (a CHILL compiler for Siemens) and nights on the Osborne BIOS and SuperCalc.

They removed the company president and each founder took on an acting VP role: Martin Herbach ran Sales, Anil Lakahara was responsible for software development, Paul McQuesten supervised Finance, and Richard - despite having a business card that read "Programmer" - was CEO, and Chairman.

[citation needed] 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 engineering organization was divided into three major efforts: 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.

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.

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).

[citation needed] 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.

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.

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.

Throughout this time, the company continued to increase headcount to get to the "critical mass" required to be a major player in the industry.

These included SuperProject, a project management program using "drop down menus," which was licensed from its creator Alan Cooper; and Paul McQuesten's SuperCalc3 for the Apple IIc (in native 6502 code.

Non-standard defocused efforts in the predominant market, especially on contracts they had for computers for which the company could not complete an effective port.

By the time SuperCalc4 shipped, in 1985, the software was so refined that it was runner-up for the product of the year at PC Magazine's annual Comdex bash.

[9] PC Magazine, in its “Best of 1986” review had this to say: “If market dominance were based on rational criteria, Computer Associates' SuperCalc 4 would certainly replace 1-2-3 as the leading spreadsheet program.

Brown & Sons, but soon after concluded that Microsoft and Lotus had such dominant market shares that even more resources were required to be competitive.

The company also funded a million dollar print advertising campaign in the Wall Street Journal and other national papers that failed to increase sales.

In the early part of 1984, it became clear that the revenue bubble that Sorcim and substantially all of the other companies in the PC marketplace had experienced was bursting.