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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."
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.
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...
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?
I've only got 640k, I was told that's all I'd ever need.
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. :)
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?
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.
>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:
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.
90 minutes of cassette tape for one kilobyte of data
good christ! what, did it record the voice of someone saying "one...zero....zero....one...one...one..." or what?
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
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
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
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!
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.