Slashdot Mirror
VisiCalc Turns 25, Creators Interviewed
Xaroth writes "It's hard to believe that it's already been 25 years since the release of one of the world's first 'killer apps.' 1979 saw the creation of VisiCalc, the first microcomputer-based spreadsheet and the single application that launched widespread computer use among businesses.
To remember this event, PC World has published portions of interviews with the three co-creators of the modern spreadsheet: Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, and Dan Fylstra. Alternately, check out the Software History website for more information on this and other historical bits."
Run it yourself!
I bet there's a Linux one floating around out there, I guess I'll try to WINE this one.
Don't bother with that Software History website linked to in the article. There's very little content, and it seems to be mostly a placeholder and a place for people to give them donations.
As far as I can tell, it has absolutely zero content about Visicalc, and I have no idea why it was linked to in the first place.
Comment of the year
Would they have ever written it, knowing that, in the end, a paper clip would be used to teach people how to use a spreadsheet.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Don't forget DB Master for the Apple II. Sold several million copies - a modernized version of it is still used in public works offices around the world, even 20 years later.
The original author still does DB work for this company.
I dont think the article mentioned this, but VisiCalc was also the first (known) enterprise app to be ported from the Apple OS to a *Nix based system.
Natural Selection: self-destruction of the poor and lazy
Visicalc
;)
Mail-from: : SU-NET host SU-LOTS-A rcvd at 3-Jan-83 0246-PST
Date: : 3 Jan 1983 0246-PST
From: : K.Kanef at SU-LOTS-A (Bob Kanefsky)
Subject: : Visicalc
To: : Songs at SU-LOTS-A
Parody-of: : Physical (Olivia Newton John)
Visicalc
Parody written by Bob Kanefsky
Idea suggested by Judy Anderson
Been working out the figures day and night,
Making good column'ation.
I gotta add them up just right --
And know what they mean.
I pencil in the fields I \guess/ you want,
Adding and subtracting duly,
Movin' my eraser up and down and
Horizontally.
Let's get Visicalc,
Visicalc.
I wanna get Visicalc.
Lemme get your budget done,
Your budget done.
Lemme get your budget done,
(chorus)
I been patient, I been good.
Tryin' to make a hand-drawn table.
My interest in your figures wanes --
You know what I mean.
I'm sure you'll understand my point of view;
We know each other fiscally:
You gotta know you're gettin' up
My semi-annual fee.
(chorus)
(chorus)
Let's get annual,
Annual.
I wanna get annual.
Let's get into annual.
Lemme get your budget done,
Your budget done.
Lemme get your budget done,
(I know there was another version of this in an old Atari magazine that said something about "lemme see your diode's rock", but Google hasn't seen it.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
and it only takes 2Gb RAM to run it in sluggish mode.
Hmm, a program from 1975 is still better then Execl 2004
This signature was left intentionally blank.
I remember watching something about the early days of PC's and there was an interview with one of Visicalc's creators and he discussed the first time he showed it to an accountant.
The accountant supposedly started visibly shaking and proclaimed "Do you realize just how much time this will save me??"
I just found that bit interesting for all the people who hold onto "the good old days" and question if computers have really helped or hindered us.
In my mind I try to imagine just where we would be if we still only had large main frames. The power of the PC is truely amazing.
(sorry just got back from a workout and am high on endorphines (or whatever they are))
-- taking over the world, we are.
What's the difference between what you describe and the idea of Lotus Improv?
Improv was a truly innovative system, which I think represents a logical method of fast data handling.
Also, could jEdit have been developed if VisiCalc and Improv had not come before it?
ah, mod points
Not to be a flaimbait or anything, but I think that your completely wrong about Visicalc. Computers aren't designed to mimic things from the real world. Many good programs don't. The spreadsheet is productive, very. In fact, it doesn't mimic paper+calc+pencil for doing banking, it superceeds it.
Help Fight SPAM today!
I think that community is coming back. With the Web, blogs, e-mail, and cell phones, we're seeing a resurgence in community. Technology is now something for bringing people together.
Visiclac kicked off ebusiness, email gave us instant global communications, mobile phones let us do that on the move, whats next?
Do you need a website upgrade?
It seems to work under Dosemu and Freedos (Dos emulation for Linux). WINE is overkill, since it doesn't use any Windows stuff.
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
You mean to tell me that solitare was not the first killer app?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Why would you expect it to work when its a DOS program? I thought WINE only re-implemented win32 calls..
Even if it did, there are plenty of dos emulation tools out there... that are FULLY functional.
( not slamming the WINE people, they just arent finished yet.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Boy, if they would have, it would have stopped alot of the anticompetitive business practices that's happened in the 25 years since, they could have locked out execl before it even happened.
Some time ago there was the question raised concerning ownership and transfer of patents, etc. of the spreadsheet, which everyone and his kid brother eventually made their own version of. IIRC the creators didn't feel they actually sold all rights or something to that effect (sound similar to the SCO/Linux debacle?) Anyone know what has been determined in that regard? Seems if it was still unresolved it would make SCO/Linux look like a tempest in a teapot by comparison.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most spreadsheets are overkill for most tasks.
I wouldn't mind some cut down spreadsheet software, a number-processing equivalent of a plain text editor compared to a full blown word processor.
Shouldn't be too hard to create something like this, I'm sure. EasySheet. KSheet. GSheet. OhSheet!
Too much software has been enticed by the lure of features and complexity, at the expense of simplicity and doing what most people need it to do.
The spreadsheet only has no real-life corollary because Visicalc made doing it by hand completely and utterly obsolete. Writing a letter isn't really sped up a whole lot by using a computer (as compared to writing it by hand, or on a typewriter). Spreadsheets are a whole different story. They were done by hand at one point, but changing some numbers and carrying forward all the calculations used to be a full time job for some people. Now it's 10 seconds with Excel. Think on that for a bit. :)
I agree with you, but we're both probably spreadsheet experts. Have you ever seen a user with only basic training, and a limited understanding of math? They know certain things are possible (because they saw us do them) but to them the spreadsheet is not intuitive. To us they are. Once you grasp relative v absolute references (and cell naming) you are usually on your way to being unstoppable.
One thing that would be nice would be a sheet that had a different display for user input data and calc'd data (I have my own shorthand but wouldn't it be nice if the sheet just formatted them automatically?
My employer spend millions of dollars redesigning their database input and report forms so they would be the same as the old mainframe systems. Dumb to us, but most users were rendered helpless by something different, even if it was more efficient. Something that looks like what a user is comfortable with is sometimes more useful than a powerful, flexible, but different tool.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I didn't even realize it until I saw tihs article, but my first programming gig was with Visicalc...
It was 1982, I was 13, and a guy paid me $50 to create a spreadsheet for him that would let him calculate his cost per share of some stock he was buying over multiple purchases (dollar cost averaging).
Bricklin and Frankston did some innovating work in (the quite stable) VisiCalc... not to be outdone, in 1982 Microsoft released Multiplan 1.0 which was a pioneer in some, shall we say, more infamous terms. It was a revenue bomb, and it's miscalculations cost customers umpteen $$. I remember hearing somewhere that the legal threats due to Multiplan almost shut down Microsoft's early operations.
Apparently, rumor was that SCO was hired to port Multiplan (to various *nix's I would guess).
Anyway, it's interesting that one of Microsoft's first attempt to unseat a software application was targeted at Visicalc. Did they succeed?
Sigs cause cancer.
Read this website several months ago and it's quite detailed. Maybe more than you wanted to know but it's very detailed and is a good read.
Implementing Visicalc
Yes, the amount of time spent doing financial reports has pretty much stayed the same. But the ability to create scenarios, to play "what if" games, has led to much better financial information being available to corporate planners.
It's like many other situations: You'll pay for as much information as you can get, rather than just get the same information more cheaply.
Not only that, but the original designer of VisiCalc describes this very issue in the article, and how the uniqueness of the spreadsheet made it very difficult to describe to the public at large. Only through immersion in the technology can you really understand and appreciate it.
so, you forgot to preface your post with RTFA.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
And yet VisiCalc was designed to mimic a real-world operation. IIRC, industrial planners used to have large blackboards divided into grids and each square in the grid could hold a number or an equation. When a number was changed in one square, all the dependent squares had to be recalculated. Of course, the concern was that something had been missed. I believe Bricklin heard one of his professors describe this process and chose it as his model for what eventually became VisiCalc.
I think I read this in Cringely's Accidental Empires.
Lotus Improv certainly sounds like something truly nifty (Google for it, there are a handful of articles about it on the web besides the one cited above). Which reminds me of Lotus Agenda, another reportedly supercool application that you can only read about today.
I wonder how many other revolutionary applications Lotus developed and later buried?
...who reads the name "Software Arts" and thinks of the innocence it implies?
There once was a time when software really was art. Now, it's a steely business. Back in 1979, Bill Gates was only some weenie whining because people were pirating paper tapes of his BASIC.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
The spreadsheet has no real-life corollary
Technically, it was real-life that gave Bricklin his idea in the first place. To quote:
Bricklin has spoken of watching his university professor create a table of calculation results on a blackboard. When the professor found an error, he had to tediously erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table, triggering Bricklin to think that he could replicate the process on a computer....
in a non-captialist society, we could work less. But since we are all wage slaves, we'll keep working all week.
Nah...because there'd always be someone working harder than you in some other society, and eventually they'd come take your cake. Sad but true.
I'll bet you a million dollars that there's at least one company, or even more likely a government agency, that still uses VisiCalc because they never had the motivation to update all their data.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
Quoth the article:
In May, the Software History Center in Boston reunited veterans of the PC's first decade to reminisce and exchange war stories. The luminaries included the three principals behind VisiCalc: Dan Bricklin, who conceived the idea; Bob Frankston, who programmed VisiCalc; and Dan Fylstra, whose VisiCorp brought the product to a surprised world. Here are edited versions of interviews with all three.
Given that it was the original source of the interviews, it seemed appropriate to mention it in the synopsis.
That green slime had it coming.