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theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

Law.com has up a review of ongoing and historical cases of telecoms suing municipalities that plan broadband networks. In many cases those same telecoms have spent years ignoring as potential customers the cities and towns now undertaking Net infrastructure projects, only to turn around and sue them. One lawyer who has defended many municipalities in this position says, "This is similar to electrification a century ago when small towns and rural areas were left behind, so they formed their own authorities." Bob Frankston has been writing for years about the financial model of artificial scarcity that underlies the telecoms businss plans. This post gives some of the background to the telecoms' fear of abundance.

Aaron Cherrington writes "Bob Frankston has written an article in which he declares that Bluetooth has failed. The article states that despite the fact it is wireless, it still has all of the limitations of wires. Is it too early to declare the death of Bluetooth, or can we can expect more out of it?"

David Leppik writes "The author of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, has an article about how it was designed. VisiCalc is why businesses started to take the Apple ][ (and personal computers in general) seriously. It also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era. Oh, and you can still download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare."