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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
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
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.
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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.
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
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).
You haven't got the slightest idea what you are talking about.
Good thing you posted as anonymous coward so that the world will not know just how clueless you really are.
Even difficult problems like the travelling salesman or Towers of Hanoi have been solved and added to the calculation engine. This kind of feature adding essentially reduces the calculation time of these problems to a O(1) table lookup.
WHAT? Start making sense. Towers of Hanoi is a 2^n problem, but it doesn't actually "solve" anything. A look-up table would make absolutely no sense. Do you need a look up table to figure out what a stack of rings looks like on peg 2 as opposed to peg 1? You could make a LUT for "move X", but the problem grows so fast, you can quickly see that just 40 discs would create a LUT that would fill most raid arrays.
The traveling salesman is NP-complete. Transforming it to a problem in P has never been done. The notion of a LUT for this problem is silly. You can only precompute the LUT for one instance of the problem. If you can convert all possible such problems to an O(1) lookup table though, you will have solved the P=NP problem and can claim the US$1million prize.
Because you are probably a sysadmin with a degree from DeVry and don't understand that notation, I'll explain it simply: O(1) means "really fast".
You've never taken computing theory yourself, have you? The next paragraph you write emphasizes that either you didn't, or you slept through the class:
If we consider that a signed 16 bit integer can only handle values between -16k through 16k,
2^15 ~= 32K
it becomes obvious that Visicalc simply couldn't handle the types of calculations that we are performing today
Even back in 1979, computers had the same computational power as a turing machine. They could perform the same calculations as computers today, their only limiting factor is available memory and available time.
(32 bits allows us values of +-2 trillion).
2^31 ~= 2 billion (or if you're one of those UK types, 2 thousand million)
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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
Anyway, it's interesting that one of Microsoft's first attempt to unseat a software application was targeted at Visicalc. Did they succeed?
Nope. In fact, Microsoft kept failing at spreadsheets until long after Lotus 123 became popular. It wasn't until Microsoft was able to leverage Windows that they finally gained a foothold. Of course, that's a story in itself.
Interestingly enough, the whole Windows story has a lot to do with VisiCalc. You see, VisiCalc took all their hard earned money and put it into creating a piece of software known as VisiOn. VisiOn was the first PC GUI for DOS. Given that Graphical User Interfaces had been the domain of expensive Unix machines, this worried Microsoft a great deal. So they announced Microsoft Windows.
In typical Microsoft fashion, they really didn't have anything. But they managed to spam the media and make everyone put off purchasing VisiOn in hopes that this mystical "Windows" would be a far better investment.
The early betas of MS Windows were actually nothing more than a way of multitasking different DOS apps. By pressing certain keys, you could switch from one "Full Screen Window" to another. About that time, Apple introduced the world to a true WIMP interface. This caused Microsoft to change directions. When the first version of MS Windows was delivered, it allowed for multiple programs to run in tiled windows. One window could be maximized at any time, thus obscuring the other windows. To be blunt, this sucked.
Windows 2.0 was only slightly better, but it sucked too. Windows 3.0 finally hit the mark by delivering a full WIMP interface and a program manager. Why Microsoft thought the program manager was a good idea when the Macintosh showed otherwise, is a mystery that will forever remain unsolved.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The second killer app was clearly the hotkey you could press in games that would instantly switch over to a simulated VisiCalc spreadsheet when the boss walked by your workstation.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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....
As to your other question, let's see...Agenda was best-of-breed, as was was Magellan. I always liked LotusWorks better than MS Works on a DOS platform. Improv absolutely killed on the NExT, but was slow as shit on Windows. Oh, let's not forget Notes, which, when I saw it for the first time in '91, caused me to say "Well, that's the future right there."
Ami Pro, while a terrific program, wasn't developed by Lotus. They bought it from Samna around the time that 1-2-3 r2.4 and r3.5 came out. Then they bundled it with those products (and a runtime version of Windows). I was convinced that Ami Pro was the coolest word processor I'd ever seen. I think I still am.