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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."
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