Paperback Software International Ltd. was a software company founded in 1983 by

Adam Osborne Adam Osborne (March 6, 1939 – March 18, 2003) was a British author, book and software publisher, and computer designer who founded several companies in the United States and elsewhere. He introduced the Osborne 1, the first commercially su ...

to manufacture discount

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

such as

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...

Paperback Writer and related

spell checker In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic di ...

Paperback Speller,

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cel ...

VP-Planner, database

VP-Info VP-Info is a database language and compiler for the personal computer. VP-Info was a competitor to the Clipper and dBase applications in the late 1980s and 1990s. VP-Info runs on MS-DOS, DR-DOS and the PC-MOS/386 operating system. The last relea ...

, and the VP-Expert

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

software. VP-Expert was developed by Brian Sawyer The company was headquartered in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

History

The company was found by a United States court to have infringed on copyright for reproducing the appearance and

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to customers and the prices. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established seque ...

system of Lotus 1-2-3 in its competing spreadsheet program, even though they did use different

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

. The loss of this lawsuit was the main cause for the foundering of the company and paved the way for future copyright law on computer software.

Overview

Not only was VP Planner cheaper, it was regarded by some as better. Adam Osborne's US Paperback Software business folded following lengthy litigation with

Lotus Software Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

. The litigation began in 1987, when Lotus initially won a copyright claim in 1990 against Paperback Software. Lotus sued

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...

over the latter’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet but, after six years of litigation, lost the lawsuit. The court ruled that it is not

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

to use the Lotus interface as a subset, but, by then, Paperback Software had folded, and Lotus 1-2-3 had faced intense competition from

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro (comp ...

Legacy

remains in use and continues to be available for download from public software archives, and through the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

was revised and updated and re-published by SubRosa Corporation as the Shark database management application.

VP-Expert was the top-selling expert systems development tool, with over 120,000 units sold and site licenses at DuPont, Kodak, and the Wharton School of Business.

References

Companies established in the 1980s Defunct software companies of the United States {{Ict-company-stub