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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."
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
I've only got 640k, I was told that's all I'd ever need.
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.
--
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.
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
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!
Promise a late delivery date, and verily, the manager shall not bug you whilst you are trying to work. Thus you deliver far sooner than if you give an accurate delivery date.
By following this strategy you will become known as a self-motivated, self-starter who consistently delivers ahead of schedule.
Additionally, your manager will never find himself with his nuts in the fire because of you, and will thus give you more 'manager support' when you need it. (read: performance review).
Good luck! I'm pulling for you. We're all in this together.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.