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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
"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
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
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.
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.
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.
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
Just so everyone knows, this required 90 minutes of cassette tape for one kilobyte of data
Nope. The Apple's cassette port used Manchester-encoded data at 1200 bps (the same speed as the Commodore 64's floppy drive).
A couple of friends and I used audio amplifier chips to simulate rudimentary 1200-bps half-duplex modems with the Apple cassette ports. Like everything else on that machine, there really weren't many limits to the I/O hacking possibilities.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
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 might have to flip the floppy over - this was a classic hiding place for Easter Eggs on the Apple ][. Example: Karateka (one of my favorites!) - flipping the disk over +boot would result in the game playing _upside_down_ - funny, in and of itself, but even more so was acting nonchalant whilst demonstrating this effect to non-computer-geeks (at that time, practically everyone else 8-) and internalizing the mixed emotions evoked when I realized that this effect wasn't (much) questioned as anything but a natural result of said floppy inversion. Yes, this was insensitive - but I was much younger then... Have fun! OldFart 8-)
[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
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.
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.