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Implementing VisiCalc
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."
now i can run it on just my 286 and not my beowulf cluster of 8086's
i sell illegal drugs
Before that all real-estate transactions needed to make sense on the back of an envelope.
How many of you have run into dumb decisions by management that looked good in the spreadsheet?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Uh, uh, loggin' in now
Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
Got em all printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight.
Do not read this sig.
It also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era.
I highly doubt that this one application started an era of "greed is good." People have always been greedy, this just let them be greedying is a slighly more sucessful manner.
What's that?
It's WHAT century?
Shit. Oh well. No Cholera for me. . .
You are not the customer.
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Mind you, I was too busy designing newspapers in Grade 3 on Apple IIe's to consider using VisiCalc on it. And damn AppleWorks was a bad wordprocessor. I guess Word isn't so bad after all, at least I don't have to change floppies to do a spell check.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
we are talking about a great program in 1980 but a completely worthless one today. Why even bother to keep it under a license?
Open the damn thing up and see where it goes. It may not go anywhere or it may turn into K-Visi or something.
Finally, a free as in beer Excel drop-in! Bye, bye, Office 2k!
Dan Bricklin has a page or two on the history from his perspective.
Unlike many software programs after it, the basic concepts of Visicalc were never patented.
You can read about why Visicalc wasn't patented here.
Kids at the nearby school, still have a room of apple 2s with this still running on them. They still use it for basic spreadsheet training too. Amazing that some schools are so poor the can't afford new PCs. At least this one picked something powerful for its time.
No.
Set this running full screen on your machine and scare people away...
Who needs VisiCalc when you've got environment variables and shell scripts
pr0n and mp3s I'd have to delete to be able to download and run this program? 27,520 bytes ? What, I'm made of money? Who's got those sort of resources?
The reason I first got my hands on an Apple ][ at the ripe age of six was because my father wanted it for forecasting and doing bookkeeping. The seed planted in my brain at that time led to an awful lot more than what he expected from the machine. If it hadn't been for that box, I probably never would have started an ISP later in life, and I probably would not be nearly the techno/gadget geek I have become since.
It is a mixed bag, admittedly. On the plus side, Visicalc indirectly led me to doing a pile of neat-o things. On the minus side, I've probably gotten laid less.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Okay, I downloaded it. Now how do I get to the flight simulator?
'which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era'
Assuming by the 'greed is good' era, you are referring to the Gordon Gecko speech in the movie 'Wall Street', you are talking about the 80s LBO boom, you're pretty far off base. That boom was enabled by a lot of things, but the biggest factor was the rise of the ability to evaluate a company's value by free cash flow rather than earnings, and the ability to nearly instantaneously gain access to huge amounts of debt (brought about by Milken's junk bond machine and certain regulatory changes affecting thrifts and insurance companies, which could really be traced back necessity-wise to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1972.)
This won't open my Excel spreadsheets! Clearly inferior software. . .;)P
You are not the customer.
I've only got 640k, I was told that's all I'd ever need.
And thus it was in the beginning. Excel was originally a Mac program. I remember one of my chemistry profs laughing at our "toy" computer and its funny li'l "mouse". Laughing 'til he saw the output, anyway. Off a networked postscript laserprinter. The year was 1985.
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Depends. Lots of small businesses bought them. My folks did, and they ran some custom accounting apps for years on an Apple ][ (which predated PCs by quite a bit), later an Apple ][e, and stil later on a GS.
Just like today, run whatever scratches your itch.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I actually wish a lot of schools would just buy older Apple II's and then use eBay as a source for programs. I run these programs through emulation on my iMac and they really are perfect for the purpose.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
That was an actual statement made at an Apple dealer I was visiting when I was kid, so the salesperson sold him an Apple ][, and pretty much one of everything in the store (the guy also sprang for a 132 column daisy wheel printer....).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
There's a nice little plaque at Harvard Biz School, in the classroom where Dan Bricklin first developed the VisiCalc idea (Aldrich 108). He came to my Managing Product Development class while I was at HBS, really cool guy. Tells a great story about doing a calculation in a very roundabout way, and then getting asked by the professor in class the next day "right answer, but why didn't you just use a ratio?" Dan said "well, this way will be more accurate." Truth of the matter was, he hadn't gotten the divide function working yet. :)
I remember running VisiCalc on my Apple //c (128k RAM, integrated 5.25" drive).
VisiCalc came in a green and white small binder, if I remember correctly. It help me learn some of the basics of spreadsheet software. I imagine I still have the binder and disk(s?) around somewhere.
From the license agreement:
1) use the Program for your personal use, not commercially,
So much for basing my business on VisiCalc these days...
I also recently downloaded a DOS game, TankWars (before Scorched Earth, for anyone that played that) and have been playing it frequently on my office computer.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Oh, and you can still download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare.
Oh yeah, let me just go ahead and break out my extra 50 gig hard drive I just happen to have sittin... did you say bytes?
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
"VisiCalc was a product, not a program. Decisions were made with the product in mind and, to the extent possible the programming was towards this end" I only wish that all the present day s/w are built like that
Visi-Calc wan't nearly as useful as Logo.
Would that be when corporations like Enron and Global Crossing were running accounting scams unchecked by the federal Government? When pardons and sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom were for sale? When there was "no controlling legal authority" to keep you from receiving campaign donations from Buddhist temples? When was that again?
I look forward to the explanation of how VisiCalc led directly to the Clinton Years.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
Many schools are dirt poor and happy to have what ever they can get. Some can barely afford PAPER, and the teachers end up buying some out of their own pocket so they can teach.
Our children are the future and our most valued possession.. yet we treat their education like a 'irritant ' and wont get involved or support it..
Plus don't forget, fundamentals don't change... and fundamentals are important, regardless of what some people/educators believe these days.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My father's business was facing a possible audit. All the books were kept on ledger sheets (one page of paper per customer) and his accountant was horrified.
I spent several long days typing the ledger sheets into VisiCalc sheets, which would then print out in a similar format, but with the balance figured by computer, not by hand.
Granted, if you look at this with 2003's perspective, it looks like banging the rocks together to make ones and zeros. But at the time, it would have cost a pile of money to get someone with a snazzy mainframe to do, and here's some kid knocking it off in the basement. The accountant was floored.
And I got paid for playing on a computer. My lord, how little has changed.
--
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Before the first IBM PC? Pretty much everywhere. Up till that point, most business microcomputers ran CP/M. VisiCalc was the original "killer app", and it put Apple on the map. Within a year of VisiCalc's release, Apple IIs had gone from just-another-home-computer (toy) to being the best-selling business microcomputers around.
Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a couple of years later completely overshadowed Apple's moment in the sun.
I find very interesting the fact that they spent so much time on user interraction. I wonder if the program would have been such a success without these efforts.
I know way too much programers who disdain UI design and refuse to acknowledge its importance in a software success. Maybe they should take a lesson from VisiCalc...
>B7:"Priceless /W1 /GOC /GRA /GC9 /X>A1:>B7:
>A7:"Never making a dime
>B5:11000
>A5:"Two Apple ]['s
>B4:2000
>A4:"Junk-food for programmers
>B3:50000
>A3:"Two Programers
>A1:"Visi Calc:
Current software in general is so over bloated we don't use but a small percentage of its features..
VisiCalc ( and many other older applications )still does more then many people would ever need.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I remember a realtor once telling me not to spend less money because a bunch of foreigners would move in next to me and talk desperagingly about me in strange languages.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I just love those Hannity/Limbaugh-worshipping dolts. They will believe anything that comes off the AM radio dial!
and neither of those systems have Linux support. Can Minix do something similar?
There was no way to start or stop the tape drive. We had to leave gaps in the data on the tape to allow for processing of each chunk of data before we got the next one.
Just so everyone knows, this required 90 minutes of cassette tape for one kilobyte of data. The had a fancy "saving" movie that used up all the processing power, or was that a certain other product?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Oregon Trail
Am I not merciful??? :)
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
As old and archaic as the interface is, my old man is still using it.
//e compatibility card for it (Apple made a PDS card that you could plug into a Mac that had a //e on it, and software emulated all of the add-on cards, and you could plug a 5.25in. floppy into the back. It even had a port to plug in a joystick or paddles!) He has continued to use these spreadsheets with his original VisiCalc 1.0 8-sector diskette on that machine, even though he has since bought a PowerMac and an iBook. The good ol 33Mhz '030 based Mac with the //e card still sits proudly in his home office with the ImageWriter pin-banger next to the Epson Stylus Photo.
He has spreadsheets that he originally wrote on the Apple II+ in 1980, and has continually updated to the point of such huge complexity it would take weeks to remake them in a more modern OS / Application.
Even when he finally broke down and bought a Mac in 1994, he bought a
What's funny is that he knows he is really screwed if that disk fails - you can't copy it because of the 8-sector format, and the manual says "if the disk ever goes bad, just mail us at $address and we'll send you a new one"
I can't believe that disk hasn't become completely degaussed after the 23+ years it has been in use
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
why???
I remember I had a Commodore 64 back in the day, and my envious friend had an Apple II. His dad's reasoning was that the Apple II was better for business, which was true, but then his dad never ever used it.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
You mean it's not available on Linux yet ? WTF?
Seriously though, 27k is a nice size for an
app that did so much. If only openoffice could
lean down their suite a bit so it loads in less than
45seconds on my AMD K7-650. (Not trying to troll)
I recall tuning my DOS system to have Lotus 123
load in less than a second. Good days
But the worst part was probably having to program these machines. 8 bit assembly code, tweaks all around, memory and speed concerns... It's much better to write a Java program in a 2.0 Ghz machine with 512 MB memory.
" A graphic for flash cards & teaching how to tell time can only be so ornate before it becomes bloated with too much "eye candy""
That's not the point. PC's are in nearly every home now, Apple II's are not. It's hard to get by these days without knowing at least a little bit about how to use a PC.
People always forget that Apple did make an "Apple III" that was targeted at buisness. Unfortunately the machine was an unmitigated failure. It wasn't fully backwards compatible with the Apple II's, and it had lots of hardware problems to boot.
More Apple III info...
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a couple of years later completely overshadowed Apple's moment in the sun.
The IBM PC played its part in Apple's fall from grace, but don't underestimate Apple's miserable attempt at a business-centric machine, the Apple III -- it likely put the final nail in the coffin as far as Apple's role in the business computer market.
This thread is no doubt inspired by the panel last night at the computer history museum on the legacy of Visicalc. It was a great time, and a lot of those of us who had worked on Visicalc's development and marketing came out, some I had not seen for 20 years.
Charles Simonyi, onetime competitor to VisiCalc, was the moderator, but he made a remarkable claim about its role in history.
What he starts with is true. Visicalc was the first app that caused people to buy personal computers in numbers, and in particular for business people to do so. In the past, people wanted an Apple ][ or a Pet. This changed, so that they wanted VisiCalc, and an Apple was the way to get something to run it on.
As such, VisiCalc sparked the PC industry, which begat, well, all of this. Quite a juncture in history.
Of course, something else would have come along, PCs are just too useful for this not to happen, but the course of it was definitely set and changed by Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra -- and Mitch Kapor, who was product manager for VisiCalc before he went to found Lotus and eventually defeat VisiCalc in the market.
The meseum at computerhistory.org will probably put up the video of the panel before too long, so you can check it out.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
My first job was as a stock boy for a small Apple dealer back in the Apple ][ and ][+ days. Was one of those early stereotype situations where we had a staff of professional sales people who were always running to the back to ask technical questions from the 14 year old kid who was stacking boxes (but spent his breaks reading manuals & playing with the hardware). Anyway, we sold Apple ][+, VisiCalc & a printer packages in what we felt were huge numbers. Dozens per week! About half went to homes and half went to business. There were no school sales in those early days because schools didn't have computers or computer education. Our business sales were fairly evenly split between small (owner/operator) businesses and big firm accountants who were buying them privately, then "sneaking" them into the office for an extra edge. Remember the competition of the time was TRS-80s, CP/M machines, Commodore PETS and then Commodore-64s (but those got labeled game machines due to the cartridge slot).
> Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
.sig! :)
A lot. Common programs were: Peachtree Accounting, dBase II, WordStar, Print Shop, Sensible Speller, etc.
Take a look here for others.
> And damn AppleWorks was a bad wordprocessor.
But it was one of the first integrated office apps.
--
This is NOT a
just fyi: for the longest time my parents used an Apple //e for doing there mail merges. i remember the dot matrix printer too, and i also remeber when i was learning about the basics and accidentally formatted the disk that had that particular program on it! man was i in trouble. oh well, back then all it took was a nice letter to the company that made the software and they sent us a new copy, just like that.
[the Apple III] likely put the final nail in the coffin as far as Apple's role in the business computer market.
I strongly disagree. The Apple II family continued to be Apple's best-sellers (in both the home and business markets) for years after the III was retired and abandoned. In fact, the Apple II continued selling well into the early Mac days, and Apple pretty much had to put a stake through its heart to put it to rest. So I'd say -- as someone who was there -- that the negative effects of the Apple III were every bit as negligable as its positive effects.
In 1979, our utility bought all our power from other suppliers and inflation was causing rates to go up incessantly. If we didn't raise our rates we would have been out of business in months. I worked in the rate dept where we would make our calculations on desk calculators and give them to the secretarys to type on the word processor (Wang?). When an error was made or new information came in - recalculate all the sheets again and then print them all.
My co-worker's (are you there Joe?) roommate worked at Apple and they had a new program called Visicalc. We tried their system for a couple of weeks, and then bought a $10K Apple II and a daisy wheel printer (how many people know what that is?). The mainframe people could not understand why we wanted a 1.2Mhz, 16K, 160K floppy machine with a yellow monitor!
We used this machine and a couple others to put together complete rate cases that totalled tens of millions of dollars. After about a year, the CA Public Utilities Commission can over to see why our numbers always added up and didn't have eraser marks all over them.
We were estatic when we upgraded to 64K and then got an Apple III. These were used until Steve Jobs got greedy and closed the box for his Lisa.
After that I try every competitor to Visicalc and didn't stop until I found a new company at a SF computer show in a 10'x10' booth. The company was, of course, Lotus 123 and we made the switch to a couple of Compaq suitcase computers (the only way IT would allow us to avoid buying overpriced IBM PC's).
We never looked back, and it wasn't too much later that I used Lotus to manage a $40M capital budget.
You're right - the MECC Curriculum was one of the greatest educational program series ever created. Problem is, all those programs were stored on 5.25" floppies, and we know how careful 2nd graders are with things like that. Worse yet, you can't find the programs available for sale anymore except in second hand shops (or eBay), and I seriously doubt any school district would want to get itself involved in emulation, due to some people seeing it as legally dubious.
School district administrators are very leery of doing business with second-hand places or eBay - to the point that it will probably only happen in a select few places, if at all. The only thing to do is to use 'em if ya got 'em - they are INCREDIBLE educational tools, but their availability is limited, at best.
The other issue is that "eye candy" has become part & parcel in the game world, so kids now expect it. If it's not there, they go "this sucks" and leave it behind. I recently went on a trip with the high school band I student teach to Chicago - I took my iBook, a copy of RockNES, and a few games from my childhood, and I had kids wondering what I was playing, but saying things like "boy, the graphics sure suck - how can you enjoy something like that?"
Gone are the days when, because you could only do so much with graphics, you had to put engaging content in its place. Oregon Trail was an incredible game not for its graphics but for its content. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was one of the unusual entries that DID have great graphics (for an Apple II) AND had great content. Number Munchers was probably my favorite game, and it wasn't the greatest graphically. Anyway, your idea is great in theory, but from the way I've seen things work at my school, administrators would reject it in a heartbeat. :(
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
--- Roy Blount, Jr.
We need that for Linux.
Not just Windows-like apps.
Not just a killer app.
We need a killer app that Windows does NOT have.
Then we'll see Windows machines on desktops _and_ Linux side by side.
Yeah, if all you need is 4 columns and 19 rows displayed.
It's hard to get by these days without knowing at least a little bit about how to use a PC.
Well, you're right about that, but it misses the point. The educational value of a computer does not, for the most part, lie in learning how to use the computer for its own sake. A computer is a general purpose information tool and one goal in owning a computer is education. Education can include reading, writing, math, science, social studies, etc. A computer can, to an extent, help with all of those subjects.
Note that an Apple ][ will help you just as much with your math as a PC, as long as the software on each is roughly equivalent.
I do get tired of hearing about school districts that just dropped $250,000 for a brand new computer lab, and then they turn around and lay off teachers then complain about the student:teacher ratio. It doesn't make sense to do that when you consider that they really don't even need the lab.
The above probably set you to thinking about how inadequate an Apple would be to learn computer science subjects. You would be right to an extent, but a lab really sees far more uses than just for computer science education. If the goal is to best serve the majority of the student body, then buying your computer equipment (and by extension the education software) around the needs of your computer science oriented students is a poor choice.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
I have reread your comment several times, and I'm not sure if I should disagree, or agree.
First off, dongle, cd check, product key, all these things are trivial to circumvent. There is no technological frontier of copy protection. There is a binary with a loop that checks for a valid device. This binary loop stands out like a sore thumb in a hex editor. It is easy to take one JMP and redirect it past the loop. If you don't belive it is easy, just look at some of the Cracker FAQs. I'm not saying it is as easy as falling out of bed, but it definately is easier than designing a copy protection scheme in the first place.
Second, copy protection is like snake-oil of the gaming industry. You have companies with names like SafeDisk and WriteBlock. You have people writing huge databases for online product activation. Think about how much it costs MS just to run their call center to process activation. Think about how much Activision paid in royalties to SafeDisk. And for what? Just so I can spend all of 30 seconds at GameCopyWorld do download a no-cd crack.
About 3 nights ago, I was hanging at a friend's house for some gaming. His copy of WinXP crapped out on him. It took 20 minutes on a long-distance call from Tokyo to Washington to get his crap working agian. Oddly enough, my "leaked" serial code has worked perfectly since the day I downloaded it.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Gobs of businesses used Apple II's in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't until the IBM PC (first shipped in 1982) became popular that businesses started to go that route.
Apple didn't do much to keep the business people... they quit focusing on the Apple II and instead built the Apple III (so overengineered that it didn't work --- there were actually chips on the board that disabled certain features -- read up on it at www.woz.org for the whole sad story). The Apple III was worthless and overpriced. The Lisa was pretty smooth, but very few businesses wanted to spend upwards of $10K per machine regardless of how much ram and HD space it had. By the time the Macintosh shipped in 1984, most mainstream business software was already PC-based, leaving only the graphics / DTP market to utilize the Mac and its features (Postscript support, a sane GUI, easy networking, etc).
Some businesses did stick with the Mac, though... in fact Microsoft Excel for Macintosh was released in 1985, it was the first true GUI spreadsheet and looks a lot like the Excel used today. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that PC users got the same look-and-feel for their Excel. (It was also around that time that MS Office began to take over the entire globe...)
Given plenty of storage and memory, AppleWorks (especially >=3.0) was a pretty decent package. 128K and a pair of 5.25" floppies was definitely suboptimal (stick with pre-3.0 versions for such a system), but with 1 meg of RAM and a hard drive (or at least 256K and a 3.5" floppy drive), it was pretty decent. The TimeOut addons were cool, as well (especially SuperFonts and UltraMacros). Just because your school didn't shell out for the goodies didn't make AppleWorks a bad product for the rest of us who did.
Besides, if your spelling was any good, you didn't need the spell checker. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Things like that have been done since then - Information Society has a song on one of their CDs called "300 8N1" - play it to your modem, and it'll output ascii...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
An Apple II is about all a person needs for basic "computer skills", especially for spreadsheets. Sure, MS Excel can walk my dog and wash my car, but the basics (managing tables & columns, writing formulas) really hasn't changed since VisiCalc or AppleWorks for the Apple II.
There are also gobs of eductional titles available for the Apple II. Unlike most modern software, many of the old titles shipped with entire binders full of manual, usage, and educational tie-in materials. Some of the MECC titles even came with full reports and studies to prove the value of the software. Sure beats the eye candy "edutainment" software of today.
Still, nothing's better than a good teacher who knows how to regulate software usage.
besides me
try to read
this article
in Mozilla
on an
800x600
display?
Very tedious
indeed.
Sorry. This post is admittedly lame, but I am working off the frustration of trying to read an otherwise rather interesting piece. I feel better now.
Both my parents and grandparents still use an Apple IIc for printing labels. They each have an Appleworks database with addresses of friends and family. Plugged into the Apple is an ImageWriter II with pin-feed address labels. Their box of 5000 labels is starting to empty... may soon be time to find a new source for the labels or *gasp* upgrade.
Well that was a lame attempt at humour that didn't quite pan out, hmmm?
A number of years ago, my wife had a tax consulting business. At one point she had a 25MHz 386sx laptop, which was annoyingly slow for the then-current tax software. One of her clients needed to access some files from a couple of years before, when she'd been using a spreadsheet on her Toshiba 1000 9.xMHz 8086-clone laptop. Wow! Was that ever Fast!.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
along with the pounds of toxic lead shielding the monitors polluting garbage dumps around the planet.
Oh I get it, Al Gore joined Apple Computer's board of directors recently to help them clean up the millions of pounds of pollution they make in manufacturing computers...
All of that legal DOJ anti-trust persecution of MS had nothing to do with it...
heh, I remember once getting paid some small sum (like $30 or so) to manually virus-scan every floppy disk in the small business my dad worked for. At first, it was estimated at 50 or less disks, but once I got going, they were pulling floppies out of the woodworks for me to scan. originally, it was a $20 job, but the extra load got me an extra few dollars, plus, I got to keep all the floppies that were "dirty" (even though the scanning process also included cleaning when necessary). I ended up with a good 15 or so newly reformatted 5-1/4 floppies, and about $10-15/hour pay. Not bad for an ~eleven year old. Of course, that was back when I was hooked on Atomic Fireballs, so my dealer (liquor store down the street) probably ended up with most of it...
--paul
-- Every time you kill a kitten, God masturbates.
I used AppleWorks 2 and 3 on a machine with a single 5.25" drive (and Apple //c to be exact). It worked quite well, but I did have to swap disks to do a spell check. Bankstreet Writer was also nice.
Fonts weren't much on a issue for me, as I rarely used AppleWorks to print my final draft -- I'd usually save the file as plain ASCII and open it up in Publish-It (a nice Apple II DTP app) for final fonts, layout, and clip art.
Before I got a Mac, I upgraded to an Apple IIgs with an Apple StyleWriter 360 dpi inkjet printer. All of my 8-bit Apple II apps continued to work, plus a few even shipped with snazzy 16-bit IIgs versions (including Publish It and 8/16 Paint).
Right on time!!! I was looking for a small Excel replacement....
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
You think the guy would have the common sense to use a spellchecker in this day and age, but no...
_Awful_ grammar.
"Greed is good" as a designator for an era specifically applies to the 1980s becuase the movie from which the quote originated was set on wall street in the 1980s. (The character was the oh-so-sleazy Gordon Gecko, and the movie was, iirc, simply titled Wall Street, also starring Charlie Sheen and (again iirc) Darryl Hannah.)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I can understand the submitter not including this information, but a good editor should add stuff like this.
The author was Bob Frankston (which required a bit of digging -- exactly two mouse clicks -- click on the story, then click on "Bob's other writings." on the top left).
(Funny that his name appears nowhere on the linked story.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Wow... I just dragged out of my computer crypt my original copies of Visicalc for Apple II.. I still have four Apple II's in my computer room. I was telling my young {20} friend about how Visicalc spurred the PC revolution. I worked in a small computer store in Stamford, CT. called "THE COMPUTER PLACE" when it all started. Apple II's started to fly out the door, each with a copy of Visicalc. I learned about DIF {Data Interchange Format} which was one of the first portable data description format {tuples/rows... etc}... I did a bit of consulting for some companies writing spreadsheets combined with BASIC programs.
It was exciting back then... I wish I felt the excitement now..
Later Ppl,
Michael Uman
Michael A. Uman
Sr Software Engineer
softwaremagic.net
no president besides Clinton did anything wrong.
Interesting, you mention Enron, then refer to cClinton, yet you don't take a jabe at the current administration.
apparently Nove Express is Dubya.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
--Rob
"Mother says there are rats in the rockery."
--Ratman's Notebooks (1968)
Towards the Singularity.
Yeah, man, please port Visicalc to the OS X!!
I'd love to be using that now instead of that Microsoft crap called Ex-Hell.
But it all depends on what you're doing with it.
It doesn't matter if you're running a PC, an Apple II+, or a PET 2001 if your goal is to put up pretty flash cards and teach history by using the Oregon Trail programme (resultant report: "People got many dieases, all of which could be cured by pressing 'Reset' at the right time)
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
True. I dl'd visicalc a while ago and tried to figure out what it could do. I could do everything i know how to do in excel (albeit not much) except charts (maybe it can do that too and i just didn't figure it out). Of course i've only used a spreadsheet maybe 5x for real, but still cool.
[Visicalc] also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era.
I highly doubt that this one application started an era of "greed is good." People have always been greedy, this just let them be greedying is a slighly more sucessful manner.
"Greed is good", IMNSHO, came from Ayn Rand, via the Objectivist society, the Society(?) for Individiual Liberties (SIL), the Libertarian Party (and non-party-member libertarians).
Rand's thesis is a reaction to, and an analysis of the reasons for, the success of Capitalism in the US, contrasted with the despotism that arose from Socialism, National Socialism, and Communism in Europe (especially her native Russia).
Objectivism's prescription for social organization: instead of attempting to perfect the individual and train him to work against his instincts, you organize inter-individual interactions so that the so-called "vices" lead the individual into what the society (and most individuals) define as MORAL behavior.
Interestingly: Just about the ONLY way that has been found to turn psychopaths into law-abiding citizens with a high success rate is to teach them Objectivism. (Since a psychopath is precicely a person who reasons solely from "What's in it for me?", this is exactly what you'd expect if the social design of Objectivist philosophy was successful. B-) )
Where libertarians stop with "stay off me and I'll stay off you", Objectivists have a well-reasoned party line that INCLUDES that as a basic element. So Objectivists tend to be revolted by many libertarians' personal morals, yet they still get along. (That's because they share that basic principle of "don't hit first", so arguments go on forever but fights never start.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's slow as hell on my dual 2GHz Zeon. I wonder why. Ah...it goes fast if I hit alt-enter and run it full screen.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
>Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a >couple of years later completely overshadowed >Apple's moment in the sun.
And Lotus 1-2-3 which eclipsed Visicalc.
We had a PDP-11/40 with six 20mA current loop connections pluggable to any of 22 campus jacks (five years ago the contractors for our UTP retrofit on the 1978 building spent most of a day scratching their heads about this bunch of wires). Apple ][s with cassette interfaces and plain old TVs were a godsend for teaching programming. A spreadsheet was manna. BeagleBrothers were gods. And in 1991 I was still able to communicte with a class in Sofia by a deuling banjos style interchange on their Pravetz clones in Apple graphics (PLOT and HPLOT and HPLOTTO on "GR" or "HGR" or "HGR2" were a universal language - like the Close Encounters scene...) i think the commands and such from Apple ][ are in my DNA now... I still have my HHGG from Infocom and a //c+ to run it on!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It's interesting how Frankston talks about skidding. Since VisiCalc has a typeahead buffer, he did not buffer the arrow keys which prevented overshooting a destination on the slow Apple II.
I find this interesting because NeXTstep had a terrible problem with typeahead when it came to scrolling in almost any application. It's a good thing those guys fixed it for OS X. At least it seems to have been fixed for OS X.
Don't forget how it let bean counters spend hours creating vast volumes of spreadsheets and fudging the numbers to get the rounding to come out.
ch00t, ch00t!
][ in middle east!
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
And all young programmers should be made to sit an exam based on this.
:
:-) )
With concepts like
"VisiCalc was a product, not a program"
"The goal was to give the user a conceptual model which was unsurprising -- it was called the principle of least surprise. We were illusionists synthesizing an experience."
"One guiding principle was to always have functioning code. It was the scaffolding and all I needed to do was flesh it out. Or not. Since the program held together omitting a feature was a choice and it gave us flexibility"
and from the section on 'kidding'
"I doubt if any but the most geeky users were even aware that there was an issue let alone a solution. This is the kind of design detail that makes a program feel good even if you don't know why."
I've tried to tell several younger coders things like this on many occassions, and getting the message through can be hard work !
This article shows not only why these principles are important, but how to approach projects overall. Someone should carve it in stone (then hit newbie programmers over the head with it until it sinks in
-- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!
old programs are great to try and program yourself,they arent very complicated but still hold an icredible amount of usability plus, you can capture the problems, and skills gained from creating a great software, without having to come up with an idea for a great software, i call this "Nostaligia Coding"
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
tried unsuccessfully to run it under wine, winex
or dosemu (no surprise). vc.com runs however fine
with vmware under linux (no surprise neither).
I remember when spreadsheet "macros" were the rage. Basically you record (or transcribe) the keystrokes used to select the menus and commands. Most menus were based on pressing a single letter to drill down to the next menu. Later they added an IF-statement and a goto of sorts, making it a Turing-complete language.
Accountants became de-facto programmers and did some pretty nifty things with macros. With this came the downsides of amature programmers also, such as hard-to-figure-out coding and other maintenance headaches.
The accountant-as-programmer trend more or less ended when Excel replaced Lotus-123 as the "in" spreadsheet package, and keyboard macros gave way to Excel Basic (I don't remember the exact MS name). Excel Basic sucked as a language. Besides, macros did not require learning anything really new because they were pretty much the very menu sequence that users typed anyhow. But Excel Basic was a completely different language that had almost no direct relationship to the user menus. Mousing instead of typing also diminished letter-centric thinking.
Astute macro users were pissed at being forced to MS, but generally appear to have eventually just given up or scaled way back on spreadsheet programming. I believe Excel had a "macro recorder" of its own, but one could not add IF statements and loops nearly as easily as 123 without getting into VB-like programming syntax.
An interesting era of end-user programming came and went.
Table-ized A.I.
hehe... thanks for the oregon trail, that brought back many memories. we used to play this, oddly enough, on apple ][ e's back in elementary school. i remember there were a couple computers (dont remember what they were, but apples) that were faster than the ][e's and we went to oregon in 7 minutes cuz the game speed was all relative to processor speed back in the day. hehe, that was good fun.
i sell illegal drugs
This man was no accountant.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
You failed it.
I once invented spreadsheet software for Enron, it was called InvisiCalc.
Table-ized A.I.
IBM owns Lotus owns Visicalc.
If IBM wants to support open-source, please, let us have the source.
Yesterday I seached in vain for a text console spread sheet, with a GUI Ã la Midnight Commander. I searched both Freshmeat and SourceForge. Does anyone else know of any other place?
Turtle:
:).
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/
(look at the Berkeley Logo section)
I use this. It's cool
I still have a copy of Visicalc, in original shrink wrap (obviously never used). What should i do with it? auction it off to colectors on ebay ? keep it as a souvenir and door-stop?
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
For those of you on linux, or any un*x with SDL, download dosbox at dosbox.zophar.net. It is a DOS emulator capable of running most real mode DOS programs, including visicalc. Since dosbox is an emulator, it should work on OS X as well. Oh, you don't need a copy of DOS, as dosbox includes it's own.
Then you will give a fortune for tools/platforms that don't make you do it for 11th time. Don't tell me you enjoy laying out screens of your applications by using absolute coordinates.
I am working on a database engine for Palm it wouldn't be practical to maintain the code written directly on top the OS that doesn't even fully implement ANSI C library.
So I had the fun of implementing higher-level abstractions. Now I have a full ANSI C library in optimized 68K assembler. I have a shared library engine that supports multiple segments, global varables, and all C++ features. Shared libraries avoid using any dynamic heap by storing their global variables and relocation tables in persistent chunks. On top of that, there are equivalents of java.lang, java.io and java.net in C++, with a hash table that supports hash["Life"] = 42. There are green threads, although I still need to debug Net.lib preemption. I have a mostly portable library that accurately emulates C++ exceptions on top of other language features to port stupid MS compiler on CE.
Finally, on top of that I have some interesting applications like a SQL listener and HTTP server with plugin support, that actually see practical use although I kind of stretched the neccessity of doing things this way.
I just wished we sold those things directly. Well, if you want to roll out your own, just consider that MemSemaphoreReserve(true) unprotects persistent store and MemSemaphoreRelease(true) will re-protect it. EvtGetEvent will hang when you are holding a semaphore though, and that includes implicit use by FrmCustomAlert, Net.lib connect dialog and so on. So you can't just always hold it. As for shared libraries, just look at CodeWarrior MSL startup code. It does most of the program loading for 1.0 devices. You can load the libraries yourself in a similar fashion. Just switch A5 register when you call another module. If you just make a few calls and overhead is not critical, you can just do SysAppLaunch with sysAppLaunchNewGlobals instead.
So anyway, I had lots of fun doing it, but now I am asked to port my code to BREW. Oh shit. I would have to reverse-engineer binary format to support global variabes. AGAIN. Port an ANSI C library on top of a crippled, proprietory API. AGAIN. Write UI tools with a half-broken form editor and lots of hardcoded switch statements if not coordinates. AGAIN. Please, can't I do a nice Zaurus port instead?
Of course, there are always unique low level puzzles that are enjoyable to solve. Like, what's the fastest way to get positions of all the set bits in the bitmap? But, you still get those in a high-level language. So low-level programming is a great thing to do for 1 year, but not for 10 years. Just imagine what a great thing you could create using high-level tools and the same effort. Of course, I am talking about nice, easy to use tools like Java, Cocoa or QT, not MFC,COM,XML and other high-complexity tools
Microsoft: We put F in MFC
Well, there are communities of people who write new games for the Atari 2600, C64 (with or without megabytes of RAM), Game Boy Advance. Perhaps you might find some joy there.
"Oh, and you can still download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare."
...
Oh darn, I was going to download it, but I really can't spare those 27KB. My hard drive is filled to the brim already with other *data*, yeah, that's the ticket
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I got my first computer in 1980 and VisiCalc was big. So was a program called ZAP - can't remember what it was but I think it was a CP/M thing. Anyone enlighten me and tell me where I can see it/run it?
My computer is completely full. I don't even have enough disk space to fin
stuff |
Ah yes, and
Back in the way early 80's, my father was a programmer on a few IBM mainframes. Although we had this fantastic Tandy TRS-80 with the dual drives and b/w integrated monitor at home to play with.
I remember it used to run Visicalc, all our home expenses would trundle through the program to manage the families finances.
We used to also have one of those big fuck-off printers which was a clunker! Fantastic device, who can forget the large orange reset button and the fantastic array of BASIC programs available.
Those were the days!
I recently found a Perl CGI version of Eliza, which used to run on the TRS-80 which brought back more memories....
lamer.
:P
e s/uti lity/misc/visicalc.zip
use the ORIGINAL Apple ][ version in an emulator, at least. You're obviously not a well trained Apple bigot yet
here's the archive of the rom
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/imag
find your emulator at someplace like emulation.net
Cartrige-based app. I'm surprised that Visicalc never made it to this machine.
Or is it a hash pipe?
Program Intellivision!
I think you ducked when the point came whizzing your way. Yes, the Apple ][ was a cash cow for years. But did it sell into businesses? Not really once the PC took root.
And the Apple ///? I know of at least one business that bought into those (Hastings Manufacturing, in Hastings, MI) and ended up dumping them off on the local library and YMCA.
I got to help maintain them. I think the Apple /// left a bad taste in most people's mouths. It's too bad -- the machine had some neat aspects.
The peak for the Apple /// was its 15 seconds of screen time in TRON. (It was the machine that Flynn was typing at while talking to CLU.) Given that it was never highlighted anywhere and that almost nobody recognized the computer then or now says something about how popular it was. :-)
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
AppleWorks was my favorite, until I really learned WordPerfect 4.2.
Program Intellivision!
There's a reason Weird Al has spreadsheets printed out on his bedsheets....
Program Intellivision!
The Apple ][ is still alive!! *g*
And they're working on an Internet suite called Contiki for it. Check at comp.sys.apple2
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
<plug type="shameless"> ... and it should have the same look and feel as a real ][, at least Dapple ][ and AppleWin are good emulators...
Well, if your PC is at least a 486/66, you can run a *good* emulator under DOS, or Windows, or
</plug>
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
BTW, I'm looking for disk images of MECC programs (I already have Oregon Trail). Mainly the "Mastering Math" series and "Word Wizard v1.0". Just to reminisce. If someone has any of this, could they ADT/SST it and wing me a copy of the disk images? Please test your program with Dapple ][ (see above) on a DOS or Win9x box, or AppleWin on a Windows box, or ..., first, to make sure it works properly.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
So you're saying that Objectivists, and therefore by extension Libertarians, are psychopaths?
No.
Being a member of the same set, or of a similar set, does not imply that all other members of the set (or similar set) have the same charicteristics. That falsehood is part of magical thinking, not logic. Follow it far enough, and you get "Psychopaths are humans, therefore all humans are psychopaths."
I'm saying that even psychopaths can become upstanding citizens if they practice Objectivism, because it is an internally-consistent philosophy that shows them "What's in it for me?" in the law-abiding, productive life.
Now, having said that, I DO get the impression that, among libertairans, the psychopaths DO gravitate toward Objectivism, resulting in them being over-represented among that fraction. A psychopath needs an explicit set of rules in order to know how to stay out of trouble, and Objectivism provides this. Libertarianism in general provides only one basic rule: Don't hit first. This leaves a LOT of room for flexibility, and a conscience is just about necessary to stay out of trouble.
But not that "over-represented" means "more than among the general population". The general population is between 1/2% and 2% psychopaths, so expect a bit more among Objectivists. But you don't have to be a psychopath to internalize Objectivism, and many (perhaps most) of them are not. (Of course if they're living by the rules, rather than merely giving them lip service, how would you tell? B-) )
I've met a lot of compensated psychopaths - most of them NOT objectivists. They're rule-bound. Everything's fine as long as YOU play by the rule set THEY learned - and if you're careful about interactions where they are ALLOWED to harm or cheat you (i.e. salesmen). But if you don't play by their rules they perceive you as "bad" - which makes them angry at you, perhaps jealous of you, and (depending on the rule set) may put you in a category where their rules allow them to cause you serious trouble.
The rules the Objectivists play by are very clear: If you didn't hit them, steal from them, threaten them, or cheat them by fraud, you're ALLOWED to be "bad". This psychopaths who compensated by learning Objectivism the most get-along-with-able psychopaths I've ever encountered.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What's funny is that he knows he is really screwed if that disk fails - you can't copy it because of the 8-sector format
Actually you can copy it. You just need a "bit copier". I know because I did it way back in `82.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
When interogated by the salesman as to why I was being so extravagant, I replied "Well, I want to run VisiCalc."
"Ah..." came the reply, "then you probably do need 48k of RAM."
Of course, later I added the language card, which pumped that bad boy up to a state-of-the-art 64k.
How times change...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
The article says that VisiCalc couldn't keep up with the tape drive, and had to leave blank space while it was thinking. That's what I was referring to.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
You sir are a turd burglar.
Read The Fuckin Dictionary; it's called hyperbole.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
And what about the Lisa? Apple's first try at something like the Mac (the Mac was an anti-Lisa project), but it flopped because it cost too much!
A DOT MATRIX printer? You mean the dying hard drive with a screw driver in it that eats paper, and spits it back out with something vaguely similar to ink on it?