Slashdot Mirror

none of us real software nerds (flattering myself again) would ever have thought of writing a program that lets you track your finances, write documents and typeset them

I think you need a couple of history lessons.

http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html

which includes in part...

What about Microsoft Excel and Bill Gates?

The next milestone was the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Excel was originally written for the 512K Apple Macintosh in 1984-1985. Excel was one of the first spreadsheets to use a graphical interface with pull down menus and a point and click capability using a mouse pointing device. The Excel spreadsheet with a graphical user interface was easier for most people to use than the command line interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet products. Many people bought Apple Macintoshes so that they could use Bill Gates' Excel spreadsheet program. There is some controversy about whether a graphical version of Microsoft Excel was released in a DOS version. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2.0 for MS-DOS version 3.0 on 10/31/87.

When Microsoft launched the Windows operating system in 1987, Excel was one of the first application products released for it. When Windows finally gained wide acceptance with Version 3.0 in late 1989 Excel was Microsoft's flagship product. For nearly 3 years, Excel remained the only Windows spreadsheet program and it has only received competition from other spreadsheet products since the summer of 1992.

By the late 1980s many companies had introduced spreadsheet products. Spreadsheet products and the spreadsheet software industry were maturing. Microsoft and Bill Gates had joined the fray with the innovative Excel spreadsheet. Lotus had acquired Software Arts and the rights to VisiCalc. Jim Manzi had become CEO at Lotus in April 1986 and in July 1986 Mitch Kapor resigned as Chairman of the Board. The spreadsheet entrepreneurs were moving on ...

---

Regardless, these memories of "dos isn't done until lotus doesn't run" go back to the 80's when I was in my 20's. It is not from slashdot period and it was widely known that Microsoft played dirty back then.

I just opened up MS Word and typed "Hello World!" and saved it to my desktop. 24,064 bytes. Why? What in God's name is that bloated app bloating in it's bloated files?

Hmmm. Stuff WGA might use when it phones home? (Think how useful the User Information settings for a new Word document might be to the Evil Empire...) Oh, I'm straying off topic for this thread...but there is little on one's system that is off-topic to spyware such as WGA if Microsoft decides to go snooping around your system without your informed consent.

Absolutely retarded. And Microsoft has the nerve to ask why anyone would want to use other software. I dare them to ask why anyone would want to use THEIR insecure, buggy, incompatible, locked-in, proprietary, asstastic formats and the apps that produce them. Microsoft should've stuck to what it did best: make Excel better.

OK, I'm biased as all hell about Excel. I know it, use it, and think it sucks compared to Lotus 1-2-3 v2+ for the vast majority of things I use a spreadsheet for. Microsoft came out with Multiplan back in the early days of PCs, when VisiCalc was king of the electronic spreadsheets. (See http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html for a nice history of electronic spreadsheets. Then see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan to learn what Multiplan is if you don't already know about it - a glaring omission in the main article at the first URL.)

Why did 1-2-3 fare so well against Multiplan? My guess is that it was simple, fast, and efficient by comparison. Multiplan was overly complicated, bloated, inefficient, and very slow. Gee, that describes Excel, too...I wonder why?

Excel's roots are in Microsoft Multiplan. If Excel were written in highly optimized x86/x64 assembler (in the tight loops that affect performance, anyway) and didn't have so much crap hung off of it (it reminds me of what a pimp would like in a spreadsheet program), it might actually be fast. Excel didn't win the spreadsheet wars on its merits, that's for sure. Microsoft's marketing muscle, monopolistic practices used to keep Windows bundled with most PCs to this day, and its unceasing use of FUD are the only reasons Excel is the dominant spreadsheet today. I'd love to be part of an Open Source project to port and update 1-2-3 to modern platforms. I doubt IBM would allow that, but we won't know until someone asks.

Given today's microcomputers, I think there is room for a program like Lotus Symphony (modernized of course) that does all of the major office application tasks in memory. Symphony was really a spreadsheet at heart and looked very much like 1-2-3 under the hood, with different views of the same data when one used it in word processing or database modes. What percentage of users work with written documents, databases, or spreadsheets that won't fit into 1GB of RAM? As I recall, the empty file overhead for Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony files was very low. Very well designed data structures and tight, fast code tend to do that.

I've used OpenOffice a little, enough to know it will do most anything I expect out of an office suite. Why pay ripoff prices for buggy bloatware from Microsoft when OpenOffice and various flavors of Linux are available for free and now have increasingly good support?

well as i understand it they only did dev for the mac because it would prove they weren't a monopoly, and they stopped doing it years ago.

Well, no, and no. Microsoft developed software for the Mac since the beginning, long before there was talk of monopolies. Some of the best known MS products were originally developed for the Mac. And the development continues today.

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.

No, the Lotus SmartSuite had a spreadsheet program named 123. And we were still buying it in the mid 90s in the military.

Actually he was talking about the car.

This Brief History of Spreadsheets might be of interest to other readers. It talks about Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and MS Excel.

Isn't revisionist history wonderful? You're obviously unaware that computerized spreadsheets were running on mainframes nearly 15 years before VisiCalc. Look here, for instance. Supercomp-Twenty was a strong mainframe-based spreadsheet at about the same time as VisiCalc. To suggest progress would not have been made without the PC is specious at best.

Bugfixes and version upgrades do not appear out of thin air.

Bug fixes and "version upgrades" (do you mean "new features"?) are development and therefore can't be called expenses of development.

If software was ... not profit-driven, this would not be the case

Software is not profit driven. Business is profit driven. ...most of the professional ones are commercial.

Of course. There are more commercial packages, so there are more commercial "professional" (whatever that means) software packages. But there exist in free software packages of equal professionalism. I'm not going to enumerate them, you should know them if you feel up to making such claims.

Most open-source/free software is reactive.

And you think Photoshop was not a reaction to what came before it? You think Photoshop was the first photo editing tool?

All software is reactive. There is little innovation, ideas are built on older ideas. WIMP goes back to the 60s, as does hypertext; remember the furore about the BT patents dating back decades? Yes there are plenty good ideas but they are incremental steps. You can't point at a vast collection of ideas, most of which are old and some of which are new, and say the whole is either innovative or not. The innovation is in the details, and this holds for Visicalc too.

The way you talk about Visicalc you would think no-one ever used spreadsheets before the late 70s.

Maybe Lotus, Wordperfect and Borland?

No. Visicalc, from VisiCorp was the first spreadsheet - not Lotus.

Spreadsheet history

Note that Excel had the first GUI-driven spreadsheet.

Wordprocessors were even older - and Microsoft Word has the distinction of being arguably the first ever massmarket WYSIWYG wordprocessor.

Borland? Not sure what you're getting at with them, but I'm pretty sure that Harvard Graphics was the precursor to Powerpoint - not anything Borland came up with.

Both Word and Excel existed as Mac programs before there were Windows versions, but they existed as DOS programs before there were mac versions.

Excel was originally developed for Macintosh. The first Windows version was labeled "2" to correspond to the Mac version.

The next milestone was the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Excel was originally written for the 512K Apple Macintosh in 1984-1985. Excel was one of the first spreadsheets to use a graphical interface with pull down menus and a point and click capability using a mouse pointing device. The Excel spreadsheet with a graphical user interface was easier for most people to use than the command line interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet products. Many people bought Apple Macintoshes so that they could use Bill Gates' Excel spreadsheet program. There is some controversy about whether a graphical version of Microsoft Excel was released in a DOS version. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2.0 for MS-DOS version 3.0 on 10/31/87.