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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."
'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.)
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
Banks do loan amortizations, not realtors.
Au contraire. A realtor will frequently use an amortization schedule to show a prospective buyer whether a property can cash-flow positively. Banks do them, too, but so do realtors, investors, homebuyers, etc. Partly because of Visicalc. Before Visicalc, more people used tables, but amortization tables have always been a part of the real estate sales pitch, especially for properties that matter, such as multi-family and commercial.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
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...
Open the damn thing up and see where it goes. It may not go anywhere or it may turn into K-Visi or something.
Since it was probably written in pure assembly language (most microcomputer apps were at the time), it's unlikely to be of much use to modern development teams. And in any case, there are already a plethora of clones available; the oldest free one I know of is sc, which runs on dos and text-based unix systems. Originally by James Gosling of gosmacs and java fame. If you really want a tiny, underpowered spreadsheet, that's where I'd start. Otherwise, why not just stick with KSpread or Gnumeric or something similar.
(I feel like I should mention oreo too, the emacs to sc's vi, but I couldn't quite work it in.)
Oregon Trail
Am I not merciful??? :)
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Has it now? I'm betting that the decrease in XP piracy is maybe 3% or less. Microsoft left a huge backdoor in the works with the name Corporate on it, and no matter how good your key encryption is, someone'll find a way to break it.
Thus, XP Corporate editions are as easily pirated as ever-- each with a different key indistinguishable from a Microsoft key.
So your 'undisputable' truth has been disputed. However, the frontiers you mention are still entirely possible, but very dependant on both the will of the customer, and the will of the pirates who are breaking these protections.
It was mostly partnerships that let you deduct losses against your income. Imagine a group of doctors that started a partnership to build their office building, they build it, pay rent to the partnership, claim a tax loss due to deprication and interest, and deduct the rent and loss from their business income, while recieving a cash payment from the partnership at the end of the year. This and other partnerships were what drove the real estate boom of the early eighties. Other investors built office buildings for the tax loss, without expecting any rentors.
These investors forgot a very important rule of investing, "what congress giveth congress can taketh away." Congress retroactivly began taxing against Passive income generators, or these partnerships, which destroyed the whole reason for building them in the first place. Combined with the end of the energy crunch led to a tremendous downturn in real estate that lasted almost a decade in oil rich cities. Remember that next time someone starts selling you an investment based only on its tax advantages.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Excel was originally a Mac program
And Excel wasn't Microsoft's first spreadsheet. First there was Multiplan. There was even a Commodore 64 version of Multiplan. Jeez, was it slow.
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
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.
Excuse me, you ignorant Penguinite but if you take a look at Richard Stallman's personal website, you'll see near the top of the page a Heading that says "Some Humor" (right after his personal ad) which has underneath it text that says:
"I like computers, music and butterflies---among other things."
Try doing your homework next time before you go off half cocked.
I was strolling down memory lane reading about Visicalc and what do I see? - holy shit! - it's Brad Templeton of PAL and Alice Pascal fame. Those kick-ass tools got me started in programming all those years ago. Thanks, man! I'm glad you've done well over the past 20 years by jumping into business - I'm still a programming schlep.
Someone got the number wrong. Cassette tapes used to record at 110 bps or 300 bps. I vaguely remember a "Kansas City Standard" for cassette tapes so that, in theory, you could write to a tape with, say, a TRS-80 and load it onto an Apple ][. Anyway, cassettes were about the same speed as modems of the day, which I found quite amusing.
Well, something you should probably have pointed out to you before you complain about a school buying a new computer lab, new parking lot or new fieldhouse, is that this money doesn't come from the budget that pays for teachers & staff. That money comes from taxes...it's the only way to run a public institution. You have a budget and know exactly how much you're getting, and you divvy that up in expenses that you exactly how must everything costs.
That new fieldhouse, and those computers, come either from a grant from the state, a gift from the community, or a bond voted on by the public. They were paid for with a one time windfall that the school will never see again. It's up to the school to use this as best as it can. If a fieldhouse makes alumni donate $10k more per year, at little or no recurring cost to the school, it's a sound investment. You can't point out that the same school is barely able to pay its employees, because that problem is related to people not voting for an increase in school taxes, or the state cutting funding, or (in the case of New York) the state suddenly deciding that everybody's going to pay 30% less school taxes. The people who granted the money for the computers or the fieldhouse don't want that money used to pay an arithmetic professor...even if that's a better use for the cash. And most states have such strict rules with grants that the school would have to full some real accounting fast ones to do this in the first place. Misappropriation of funds is the kind of thing that causes principals their jobs, and they're otherwise in a pretty secure situation.
It's like having a birthday where all you get is toys...only you're 27, and you could really use the cash, not to mention clean socks and underwear. I guarantee you that even as those school in Cali are firing 25,000 employees, many of them will be getting bitchin' new lunchrooms and rooms full of top of the line flatscreen Dells. My old university just finished building a $15,000,000 student union, despite needing new dorms so much they're renting a HoJo. Of course, they'd have to PAY for the dorm.
Hey freaks: now you're ju