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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."
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.)
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.