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http://www.bricklin.com/firsts...
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* What you can still do in 32KB of RAM!

God damn youngster

http://www.bricklin.com/histor...

There's visicalc in 28K

List (and discussion) of it here:

http://www.bricklin.com/tabletcomputing.htm

and I still miss Looseleaf Notetaker even when using EverNote or Microsoft Journal.

That said, I still haven't seen a tablet which displaces my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 which has:

  - daylight viewable display --- I use it as a map reader on trips
  - handwriting recognition w/ a pressure-sensitive stylus --- I type quite enough at work, writing something, even on a screen is a pleasure by comparison
  - pressure-sensitive input for graphics apps --- I draw or sketch in ArtRage or AutoDesk Sketchbook or FutureWave SmartSketch (which was ported over to Mac and Windows from PenPoint and eventually became Flash by way of FutureSplash Animator), and work up drawings and letterform designs in Macromedia FreeHand
  - the ability to run pretty much _any_ application, directly on local files w/o jumping through hoops --- I use LaTeX and FontForge

But the Visicalc info given in TFS is totally wrong. It uses 29K of RAM, which is not the same as the size of the binary.
First google hit for "visicalc binary size" gives this page: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm which tells us that the binary is only 27,520 bytes, and even gives a download link to a working copy of Visicalc. I guess 29K is close enough to 27,520 bytes, but it's wrong, dammit!

Well on a side note if you want to see what Visicalc was like http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
You can download it free legal. It still runs and is still a useful tool Its also only like 27k!

And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.

The low numbers are partially because the baseline cost is free - go to the library (or Project Gutenberg for pre-1923 works, the last year to probably ever be public domain). The truth is, the product you buy is not a product, it's a one-platform non-transferable DRM encrusted unresaleable bunch of words that will be disabled when the dot.com at the other end of the wire decides it's profitable to abandon or goes out of business, sold for the same price as a tangible product. Ebooks are massively crippled so they are worth even less than a sherlockholmes.txt ASCII file, and yet have still been priced uncompetitively, almost so they won't make a dent in the centuries-old paper codex business.

The only sheeple customers who can't say no to DRM seem to be those who respond to marketing that tells them they need to buy the latest gadgets to be cool and fashionable. Why do you think iPhone buyers were so upset when the price of the phone dropped from $600 to $400? Because more people could afford to join the fashionista club.

You are mistaken. The backwards compatibility in fact goes all the way back to DOS 1.0 (before subdirectories and file handles). As evidence the original 1981 Visicalc executable still runs under XP!

Actually the first version was called Vulcan. The rest of your story is correct.
I remember DBaseII looking back I am dumbfounded that we where will pay $500 for that program. I am at the same time shocked at what it could do in 64k...
Kind of like this program http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
My how things have changed.

Exactly. When I read the summary I thought the same thing. If you don't have a lot of data and only want to do a few simple operations on it, any spreadsheet will do just fine, even a very old or very basic one. In fact, though it's not open source, this 27 years old, 27 kb software should suffice : http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm ;)

But yeah, as everyone else said, SQLite is probably what you're looking for.

...its darn near a sure bet that its developers never thought it would be around that long.

What would we have if designers were trained and we had infrastructure to PLAN on a program being used for 200 years?

earlier comments to the effect that code is inherently long lived vis a vis hardware is a point well taken and mother nature provides the strongest example. Dinosaurs, dodo birds and Neanderthals are all gone but many "protein subroutines" in their vanished DNA are STILL "conserved" in our very own DNA.

So why is visicalc so fast on modern computers?

It's missing a few features of "modern" spreadsheets, but at 26.9 Kbytes (for the version that runs in a DOS command prompt), there probably isn't anything smaller.

Actually, MS have done quite well with forwards compatibility.

I can still double click on .com executable files written well back in the mists of time and run usable programs.

For example, here is a version of Visicalc from 1981!

http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

What country do you live in, because it can't be the US. There is only so much data that can come into a home over coax/copper line. Take a look around any city and think how much it will cost and how long it will take to get fiber to all of those homes. Ever been to the country, because out there you can't get anything but dial-up, and the most promising rural technology is high speed internet over 50 year old power lines. It will be decades before the US has any kind of consumer fiber network.

Check out how much effort and equipment needs to be installed throughout the city and the house to get fiber. Even then he's still only getting 15 Mb/S.

I don't buy that argument. He claims that QoS becomes useless when the Internet Pipes are completely full, likening it to emergency vehicles on the road. However, QoS allows packet reording between streams, so there's no notion of "I can't get through because something's obstructing me". QoS really shines at maximum capacity, because the higher capacity results in more prioritizations necessary.

Bricklin's second argument about buying more infrastructure instead of applying QoS is a bit of a tangent, as well. Maybe for a huge company like AT&T there's dark fiber sitting around providing a scarce resource, but all of the ISPs that aren't mega-corporations have to choose between paying big bucks for the bandwidth or applying QoS essentially for free. Besides, there's no reason that a company can't just do both. There's no mutual exclusitivity.

I see alot of posts talking about QoS around here. But... have you guys actually read up on why you don't really need QoS? Really?

From http://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm -- Dan Bricklin's Web Site: www.bricklin.com
-----
VisiCalc: Information from its creators, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston
If you're looking for material about VisiCalc, this is the place!
-----

Also see WordPerfect, PerfectCalc, PerfectWrite, etc. The latter two came with a Kaypro computer I once worked on.

Mmmmmm, CPM.

Absolutely correct. You can, in fact, download the original version of VisiCalc -- the original spreadsheet program, released for MS-DOS in 1981 -- and run it, unmodified, in Windows XP.

The DOS WC games either fail miserably or need tweaking to get working.

This is because these are really not DOS games at all. They are games that access the hardware directly, and happen to run under OS (DOS) that lets them do that. Properly written Windows game that uses OS-provided API will still work.

IMHO, the Mac ends up having superior backward compatibility.

Well, VisiCalc from 1981 (!) still works on modern Windows. You can try it out at: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm. Can you name any Mac program that can do that?

Visicalc for the IBM PC

No need. The whole program is 27K.

http://www.bricklin.com/history/vclicense.htm

Mr Bricklin's site also has an explaination of why VisiCalc wasn't patented: http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm In short, it just wasn't how things were done then, and the lawyer didn't think he could pull it off.

vc.com to get it without a license. Beware that this isn't really for the PC; it's for MSDOS. Most people will need dosemu or something like that, to be able to run it.

I loved this... his web site includes a downloadable VisiCalc binary from 1981. It's 27 KB large (smaller than most web images, he points out) and it's a pretty powerful piece of software. Still runs on my modern dual core system, talk about longevity. Wow. All the Flash and Visual Basic in the world can't make me forget how awesome and elegant some older software is. I started out by writing in assembler myself

Chiapaint. A decade old, and more relevant than ever. The only thing out of date is the modem squawk.

Of course, if Chiapaint doesn't convince you, enjoy, you can go to any number of websites that will cause a cute little picture of a steaming coffee cup to appear in your browser window for about a minute and then crash, misbehave, post error messages, display a grey rectangle, or tell you to update your version of Java.

Yes, lots of other phone companies have made promises about bringing FTTH utopia, however the difference is that Verizon is already doing it. They've been rolling it out in several places around the northeast for a while now.

Here's a blog with lots of details on how the installation is done: http://www.bricklin.com/fiosinstall.htm.

We use freeDOS to run many mission critical sytems at my work...Like VisiCalc and WordStar (both pop)

A1:A7 was a necessary (computer) memory-saving expediency --- http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm

Not necessary now though --- http://www.simson.net/clips/91.NW.Improv.html

At the very least, I know of one accounting firm which requires only named ranges be used in calculations --- (cited in ) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0534 371353?v=glance

William

If you do not know Chiapaint, go immediately to www.bricklin.com/chiapaint.htm and download this hysterically funny 1996 demo which "is most funny to people who understand the technical problems (and who haven't made major financial commitments to downloadable component software)"

If you've tried AjaxWrite--I have--you'll see that most of Bricklin's remarks are still dead on the money. I, for one, waste twenty minutes trying to find a Mac browser that would work with this supposedly cross-platform application. I gave up, went to a Windows machine, spent a little more time download browser updates until I found one that worked.

(And then, of course... I proceded to load, not just any Word document, but the precise Word document I was actually working on at work that day. Nothing deliberately outrageous in it, nothing deliberately intended to test compatibility, but, sure, it used a Word style sheet and it had some pictures in it. I think the best way I can characterize the experience is to say that AjaxWrite didn't do as good a job at rendering a Word document as Mac OS X's TextEdit program does... and neither of them was acceptable).

They also created the 3 1/2" floppy diskette, which (thanks to AOL) was my primary medium of cheap storage for several years. Sony working with Philips developed the CD standard and that really took off.

/me twiddles his Sony eMarker nonchalantly

Virtually all Windows software from 2000-1 still runs without any issues.

You can download Visicalc from http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm and it will still work. It is from 1981. It targetted MS-DOS 1.0 which was before subdirectories existed (the big feature of MS-DOS 2).

As I like to say, Microsoft puts the backwards into backwards compatibility.

The article links to another article, Why Johnny can't program, which is really good. That article has a good concept: That what we call "programming" is actually a hierarchy with shades of gray. C++ is programming. But is writing an Excel macro programming? How about programming a VCR? What if I write requirements and then code-gen a class hierarchy or a database schema? Programming is more than just writing code.

But the ZDNet article has the highest hype per paragraph ratio of anything I've read for a while. Web 2.0? Is that the buzzword replace Internet2? "Programming collaboratively?" And of course, AJAX & web services will make everyone a programmer. Some editor just linked a bunch of articles on similar subjects, threw in enough buzzwords, and jumped to a conclusion. Yes, everyone is now a programmer. "Sure grandma, I can set the clock on your microwave for you. I'll be right over."

On his "Writings" page he has some interesting thoughts about the music industry. He seems like a pretty levelheaded guy to me - not one of the "downloaders should be jailed" types, but not a raving "everything should be free" fanatic either. Worth your time IMO.

I don't believe that software patents are a good idea, but if I developed anything patentable at work, I'd feel comfortable having my name put on the patent.

Dan Bricklin, the author of Visicalc, has written a thoughtful piece on his views on software patents.

That said, I also feel that no matter how much you might feel that patents don't work for the software industry, and how much you may take up the torch to change the law, it is the law today and a fact of programming life as much as Microsoft, the instruction set of the machine we write for, the turning of the century number, and the need to pay for food. Ignoring them won't make them go away, nor protect you from those that do not have the same beliefs.

The latest versions of P2P like Frenet,GNUnet and WASTE implement what Bricklin envisioned in 2000: friend-to-friend networks:
http://www.bricklin.com/f2f.htm

You can download VisiCalc from here.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

It is 17K compressed (26K executable).

and does most of what I do with modern spreadsheets (I am a very light user of spreadsheets).

LOL

Visicalc still runs on all of them.

http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

> For that matter, is there anything that can read VisiCalc files?
Try this.

"Can anyone explain to me, clearly and convincingly, exactly how the average joe office worker's life benefits from the capabilities of Excel in 2005 versus Lotus 123 in, say, 1990, excluding Y2000 fixes, speed and memory?"

To pick one example, pivot tables. Pivot tables enable Excel to do a form of OLAP that a lot of businesses are getting a lot of mileage out of.

Note that I'm not a big fan of Excel, or indeed of spreadsheets in general. But I'm not sure the form of the critique given above is fair. Once VisiCalc established the basic spreadsheet idea, the rest almost necessarily consisted of minor improvements. So what? It's hardly like spreadsheets are the only financial tool commonly used by office workers in 2005---a very different situation from 1990. Modern expert-system tax preparation, for example, has revolutionized some classes of office work. There's innovation still going on; it's evident in VisiCalc-like groundbreaking products for the most part, though; not so much in feature enhancements.

That program can be beaten! Visicalc which ran under DOS 1.0 (in 1981) will still run under XP today. Try it: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

To be fair I also tried a vi binary from Linux 0.12 (1992) - http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/Linux-0.12/binar ies/usr.bin/
I had to install libtermcap-compat and lie about the terminal type, but it did work.

Sadly graphical programs under Linux don't fare as well. Taking the most active Linux/Windows program on SourceForge, Gaim, you can see how one set of binaries is sufficient for Windows (98/2K/XP/2003) while Linux needs different builds for every version of every distribution: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php

I think this may be a bit more practical than this phone service. Personally I find most of these songs occur while I'm driving in the car. As I am already accident prone, this would make things a lot safer for me than trying to drive and hold this up to the speaker near my foot. Although with XM, I no longer need to worry about this mess.

but Apple never really got any sort of hold in the business market
Visicalc nearly did that. But since IBM had yet to legitimize personal computers with their "entry level systems," PCs were still looked upon by the business community as hobbyist toys.

Actually, MS are pretty good at that as well.

You can still run software from 1981 on windows XP.

Take a look for yourselves (those in Windows) here

now stop wining...

visicalc is the only and true spreadsheet and it still runs today.

That's the kind of backwards compatibility Microsoft, Sony, etc. can only dream of. ;)

Excuse me, but: huh?

I'm no Microsoft booster but Windows has remarkable backwards compatibility with MS-DOS (for anything except games, which tended to venture into Here There Be Dragons territory on things like memory management).

Here's an experiment you can try for yourself. Go download VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program (the copyright holders have made it available for free download) onto your shiny Windows XP machine. Then double click the circa-1981 executable.

Voila! It runs!

That's twenty-four years of backwards compatibility, which in the PC era is pretty astounding.

In fact, if Microsoft can be blamed for anything it's having too much backwards compatibility, which has made Windows the crufty monstrosity it is today. But let's be fair in what we ding them for.

Actually, Visicalc was a "first".

The first commercial success for the Apple II, perhaps. The first spreadsheet? No. The first electronic spreadsheet? No.

Remember what I said about incremental improvement? Dan Bricklin himself says that he saw Visicalc as an incremental improvement to a Texas Instruments calculator.

The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to me while I was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on my MBA degree, in the spring of 1978. Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream. "Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse..." -- http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiidea.htm

Even then, the idea of spreadsheets didn't come from Bricklin. They have been used by accountants for 100s of years. So even from that perspective, Bricklin's contribution was an incremental improvement over pen and paper spreadsheets.

Even then, Visicalc was not the first electronic spreadsheet. That honor goes to Mattessich who wrote an electronic spreadsheet in Fortran.

In the early 1960s, Richard Mattessich (then at the University of California at Berkeley; since 1967 at the University of British Columbia) pioneered computerized spread sheets for business accounting--first in a paper "Budgeting Models and System Simulation" (The Accounting Review, July 1961: 384-397) and later in two books Accounting and Analytical Methods (Chpt. 9 which contains the mathematical proto-type model) and Simulation of the Firm Through a Budget Computer Program (both, Homewood, IL: R.D. Irwin, Inc., 1964) which contains, among others, print-out illustrations and the computer program (the latter written in FORTRAN IV by two of his research assistants, Tom C. Schneider and Paul A. Zitlau). This contribution (anticipating such best-selling spreadsheet programs for Personal Computers as VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, et.) has variously been recognized in the accounting and related literature,

In any event, I think it's unhealthy to focus on "being first". Everything is built upon what was learnt before. That's why technology continues to advance, rather than starting from scratch with each generation.

...and you have some venerable company in Dan Bricklin.
The bad news is ,neither of you are likely to get rock-star rich from your spiffy new idea. As for the idea-sewer that the USPTO has become: take advantage of it. The barriers to filing were lowered and you can stake your claim easily enough...just try to make your money before you get sued. The examiners have been forced to leave the real work up to the courts but by the time the process reaches that stage, you should have sold your company and gone on to the next thing. Dan Bricklin would say to just forget about patents alltogether

...because it verges on flamebait for responses that will not be entirely on topic [I thought the /. gods did a good thing recatorizing the story as IT] but the sparks have been kind of flying and I do enjoy fireworks. The sad truth is that there are valid points being made by both Calamormine and Quaters. Consider how some small time software developers try to make a living with share ware or the "free" trial version that, if you like it but want all the bells and whistles, you have to pony up 59.95 to get a licencse key [and of course, those poor guys are at the mercy of people who pass around key-gen programs]. Point being that products that benefit from word-of-keyboard marketing CAN take advantage of pervasive sharing. You could learn a lot from reading Dan Bricklin's article on how the right license can make or break a small company's fortunes. BTW, My oldest son is a fairly creative musician but though he still spends hours per day composing or improvising, has chosen to study molecular biology, abandoning an idea he had in high school to put his compositions up on his web site. Why? When he comes home from college, I unplug the rest of our computers from the cable modem, he plugs his laptop in so he can keep picking "stuff" up with Ares. I let him have a nice wallow in the information sewer highway and point out the keylog files on his hard drive at the end of his visit. Within a few days the weird protocol/port combinations bouncing off my firewall drop down to normal levels. Why? You have to ask someone his age I guess.

I can't tell you how fervently I wish I could make a living in a cabin off the grid with a few hot PCs and a solar powered satellite dish serving up fairly priced tricks and treats you all would not mind paying to have on your computers but I can't think of any way to protect it. I have resigned myself to working in a soulless megacorp, writing software I can't tell anyone about because megacorps have the means to get customers by the short hairs and hang on.

visicalc ~ dan bricklin (danbrickin.com)

apple 2 ~ steve wozniak (woz.org) , others (folklore.org)...