Chopra Reaches the Pinnacle

摘要

In 1985, Ajay Chopra got an unexpected bonus. He was an engineering manager working on a graphics workstation for Silicon Valley-based MindSet. Great design was one of the project's goals, but even Chopra was surprised by its reception. "It eventually found a home in the Museum of Modern Art's collection," says the current COO of Pinnacle Systems. The reason? Sleek style. The workstation's ultra-modern design was devoid of ugly internal floppy drives. Instead, it relied on slick external modules. (And it was one of the first to use a mouse.) Although it delivered all the processing power a graphics pro could want, the workstation lacked one major component: applications. AutoCAD software was just beginning and, though popular for industrial design, wasn't widely used in graphics. Chopra and MindSet had a problem—creating a PC platform without software—they couldn't solve.