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The First Killer App: VisiCalc
Sabah Arif writes "The first electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc, helped transform the Apple II from a home computer into a business computer. Without VisiCalc, it is possible IBM would not have introduced the IBM PC in 1981. Read about the software at VisiCalc's creator Dan Bricklin's site and a brief history at Braeburn."
I thought the first killer app was email?
If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
--Kurt Vonnegut
it turns out VisiCalc looked more like a giant chick than a lizard.
http://www.bricklin.com.nyud.net:8090/
Although I am very familiar with the history of Visicalc as it was one of the first programs I bought for my Apple ][+ back in 1982, I am happy to see articles like this on Slashdot. We need more stories about this history of computing and the Internet to educate all the N003Ies out here.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say the first killer app was probably pr0n.
Even if it was 20 character wide, uppercase ASCII, downloaded on a 110 baud accoustic-coupled modem and printed to a teletype machine hooked up to a CDC mainframe.
That was probably the point where someone said, "holy crap, this computer thing is gonna take off!"
After Visi-Calc, though, it was Lotus 1-2-3 that defined the spreadsheet; to ease transition, it could read .vc files. (Version 1 was pretty lame, though, as it couldn't do any string based functions. Version 2, though, was much better)
.wks and, to some extent .wk3 files to ease transition.
Lotus, though, was a real pain when it came to graphing - it was a case of "set this; try it out", rather than real-time drawing. So, Excel took over the mantle. Again, it could read
So, the next question is: what is the killer feature that will make people convert from Excel to something else? Or, to put it another way, what feature of Excel is still a bit clunky to use?
"She's furniture with a pulse"
The first killer app in the financial field was the Abacus. Before, all that people did was string beads, and sell them. With the coming of the Abacus, people could now do math faster and easier than clay tablets.
And here is the original article :)
Simply amazing, Slashdot is these days.
we discovered a new way to think.
To be fair, I'd argue the first killer app was cracking. The very reason the first computers were ever built was to do this task which really was a matter of life or death.
Ironic, when you think about it: The first killer app, the reason computers first got built, the app that saved civilization, was encryption cracking. Now we have the DMCA to save us from it and the MPAA arresting sixteen year old Swedish kids for doing it.
FP!
No, I'm sorry. Try again.
and this article is a dupe..
Not only is this article a dupe, but it dupes a story that was posted over a year ago, which is pretty pathetic.
It's one of those stories that naturally gets duped every year or two as part of the normal "news cycle."
It's a real issue in the marketing of all specialized print magazines. How do you keep your subscribers after the second year, because that's when they start to feel like they're reading the same stories over and over.
Most magazines deal with the issue rather crudely by printing product PR pieces diguised as stories, as there is a never ending stream of new products (and paying advertisers for them), whether they're needed or not, but this is Slashdot, New For Nerds, Stuff That Matters, so we don't have the problem here.
Oh, wait.
KFG
And this little app is nearly like excell (except the lack of a point click GUI) Now how the fuck did MSFT manage to add so much bloat to 27,520 bytes
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Excel is frozen in time. When people no longer need compatibility with MS Office/OpenOffice, then Excel will die its much-deserved death.
Back in the 1980s I used a wonderful "presentation worksheet" program called Trapeze on the Macintosh. It used named variables instead of row-column references and was insanely powerful. You could position your data variables anywhere you wanted, style and size them independently of other datablocks. The datablocks could even automatically resize if the numbers of rows and columns in the variable changed.
It died in the marketplace because reveiws claimed it wasn't "Excel-like."
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Slashdot. News for teens. Stuff that mattered.
gtkaml.org
Here's a perfect example of how software patents would have drasticly changed how things are today...
Imagine if the folks that came up with Visicalc had gotten a software patent for it?... Which big software and OS manufacturer wouldn't have a huge chunk of their current profits and wouldn't have at least one of the apps in their office pack?... How might the software landscape be different today?
I was always told that "you can't patent an idea," but software patents come close to that....
It seems that while it's not the first killer ap per se, it is the first (or one of the first) that got some momentum going in the idea of using computers for small business and personal use.
see a Text Widget
The success of VisiCalc turned Apple into a successful company, selling tens of thousands Apple II's to businesses who wanted them only for the spreadsheet.
///. Subpar engineering and other bad choices (such as intentionally limiting backward compatibility) was a perhaps mortal blow against Apple's business entry. Undoubtedly the Mac made up for some of this later, but I've always been of the opinion that Apple should have focused on and expanded their core, the ][ line. It was similar to IBM's PC (and later clones) in its expandability and presented far more possibilities. Why did they not simply pursue a GUI for the ][ series instead of branching off with a completely different product?
Here we have the promising beginnings of a company that could revolutionize the business market with personal computers. Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so? Here are my thoughts.
- Apple
- The ][ platform wasn't opened up to cloning. Granted, no one, including IBM, was prepared to actually sanction this; the culture back then was of every microcomputer manufacturer having its own hardware, OS, disk format, et cetera - each one dreamed of total domination with its own platform. It took Compaq's sleight-of-hand on IBM to do it. Why was no such cleverness pulled with the Apple ][ platform?
Your thoughts?
The coolest voice ever.
The most recent software install on my current notebook was 1.8GB.
Visicalc had nothing to do with the Apple II. It was available for the TRS-80 as well, a far more capable business machine.
excell handles curve fits much better than open office, and it statisical anaylis of data is much better also. As for improvements, The optimize function, doesn't seem to work as well as I would like, Also I would like it to have symbolic integration and derivation built in so I don't have to switch back and forth to maple. Oh yeah and the autocomplete could stand to be more predictable.
Most people I discuss this with don't even know what I am talking about, so these are most likly not killer apps
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
::
It is remarkable that Apple, with all this experience in spreadsheet development, has not yet released the logical companion to its Keynote and Pages applications, [Calculate]? (whatever they decide to name the spreadsheet app).
Curious, when when they were the first to release a good spreadsheet for the desktop, this is a gaping hole in the iWork suite IMHO.
# ~: no sigs today
Yes, I'm aware of the Franklin, the Laser, and the other ][ clones... my question is really: Why did these cloning efforts not lead to a massive spread of the ][ platform in the way that Compaq and other PC clones did for IBM?
The coolest voice ever.
We need more stories about this history of computing and the Internet to educate all the N003Ies out here.
If you were just getting into computing today, would Visicalc mean anything to you at all? My first computer (a Commodore 64) was bought for me back in 1982. I still fire up an emulator every now and then to nostalgically play 8-bit games like Archon and Seven Cities of Gold. Hell, sometimes I just like to type "POKE 53281,0" to see the background change.
I can't imagine there are many people who experienced their first computer in 2005 that would do these things with the same interest I do. To them, Archon is a crappy chess game with crappy graphics and Visicalc is a crappy spreadsheet program.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Today on /. I learned that text processing already existed 20 years ago (on the thread about Masachussetts choosing an open file format) and now... Now I learn that MS didn't invent the spreadsheet concept either !?
There were GUIs and a mouse for the apple ][ series. There were also more powerful versions of the CPU, both in terms of speed and 16-bit (and 32-bit) address space.r _65816
//c clones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Design_Cente
And there were several clones of the Apple ][ series. Look up Franklin (sold to many schools, and had an early apple with upper & lower case support). And, the Laser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_family
Sorry to ruin your theories...
Dude, you can't get a patent for a program, only for an algorythm, busniess model or invention.
If you could patent programs, Microsoft would have the entire software industry sewn-up.
No matter where you go... there you are.
Read my above post - and my question. Perhaps you'd like to take a crack at answering it.
And I know about the pre-GS/OS GUIs. They don't count. Apple's GUI was the Mac. Why did they not stay with their ][ core and aggressively pursue a GUI for it?
The coolest voice ever.
But neither of these makes quick-and-dirty graphing as easy as MS Excel does. Until that happens, I don't think we need to figure out what to add.
However, the arbitrary row/column limit in Excel has frustrated some of our users. Personally, I think the solution is to use something other than a spreadsheet once you reach that limit (scientific plotting/analysis software and/or a database). However, showing them that you can set the row/column limit in Gnumeric (at compile time), made their jaws drop & they started using that instead. If the F/OSS spreadsheets offered this at runtime and made it easy, they might pick up a few more converts.
And this is news because...?
Repeating that just to stave off anyone ready to jump in with a remark about those. I should have made that clear in my first post, but you can refer to my reply. Clones existed, but Apple fought them tooth-and-nail much as IBM did. Why were the IBM clones so much more successful in the end?
The coolest voice ever.
Visicalc still runs on all of them.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
Three out of the five replies to your post are from you. Maybe next time you should take your medication and then post.
Yes, but you could definitely patent the IDEAS behind a program.
If patents worked like they do today back when VisiCals was invented, there surely would've been patents on "Method and apparatus for using a computer to perform calculations on values input by users into a grid-like spreadsheet".
VisiCals would be the ONLY spreadsheet there is.
I was selling computers - Ataris (400/800), Apples (][+, //c), IBM ("PCs": 5150), Commodores (VIC-20, C-64), Texas Instruments (99/4), Colecovision (Adam), even the occasional Sinclair. Out of a neighborhood video rental store, which was the "high tech" center of town. We sold them mostly for games, an upgrade from people's Atari VCS/2600, or Intellivision, Colecovision. It was an amazing storm surge when VisiCalc came out. Instantly, an Apple ][+ was the computer to get, though they were all about the same, in different styles (I preferred the Atari). A couple of California hippies had blown the global powerhouse IBM out of the water for small businesses.
Little stores and offices that never even used a paper ledger before could now have an electronic "accountant". For the first time, many of them actually had financial plans. Many of them exchanged financial and inventory info on floppies, where they never had coordination before beyond maybe their own employees. I was there for the first PC revolution itself, in 1977, when Commodore PET/CBMs, Radio Shacks, even Altairs and IMSAIs put an aircraft carrier in any garage. And I was there for the "desktop publishing" revolution, the LAN revolution, the Internet/Web revolution, etc. The VisiCalc revolution was the watershed.
And what's funny is that its descendents, PC spreadsheets, are still the killer app. Tables of calculated data are how most people think of computers. Excel is probably the best program (other than screensavers) ever written for a microcomputer (ironically, by Microsoft for a Macintosh). Those VisiCalc guys are heroes.
--
make install -not war
How many Visicalc stories do we need? There's one here , one here, and one here. What's new in this story that isn't covered in-depth in the others?
/. crowd was out of diapers.
.. oh the l33tness of it all.
Posting stories about old technology allows us old guys to fill the aching need we have to tell you how l33t we were before most of the
You know; "The older I get, the better I was"
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to reminisce about wordstar, acoustic couplers and hard sectored 8 inch floppies..
http://request-header.info
Also, you're talking Apples to oranges -- the Apple /// didn't have a GUI, so giving the Apple ][ a GUI wouldn't have helped it replace the Apple ///. In fact, the reason the Apple /// failed is because most people felt the Apple ][ was a superior, more flexible computer, so they kept buying those.
Apple did eventually paste a GUI onto the Apple ][ series, as well -- have you forgotten the Apple //gs? The problem there was, not only was the IBM PC already going like gangbusters by the time it was released, not only was the //gs competing with both the Amiga and the Atari ST for the color games market, but Apple had already released its first Mac by the time the //gs came out. There was a well-documented battle going on between the Apple ][ camp and the Mac camp at Apple, and the Mac camp won. Nobody was going to promote the Apple //gs as Apple's gold-standard software development platform if it meant cannibalizing Mac sales.
Breakfast served all day!
Why did they not simply pursue a GUI for the ][ series instead of branching off with a completely different product?
They did, the Apple IIgs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIgs A friend of mine upgraded to one of these. I seem to recall it was about this time that the Amiga came out. This was when I moved off the Apple ][. Despite the claims of 'Apple ][ forever', Apple killed off the ][ line.
Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
Without Ken Thompson's "Space Traders" we would have no UNIX. So I think that's the first killer app.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
It was not Visicalc alone which made the Apple ][ successful, although it did significantly raise awareness of microcomputers in the mainstream. Prior to Visicalc, the market was mostly hobbiests and bleeding edge early adopters.
What made the Apple ][ successful was the combination of an all-in-one computer except display), color support, a low cost and reliable disk drive, a good selection of useful applications, (including Visicalc and Applewriter), and most importantly, a flexible and well documented hardware expansion bus. It's biggest deficiency was lack of 80 column and lowercase text support, which quickly became available with add-ins and later on the //e.
The TRS-80 was popular because it was cheap, it sold for $600 with display when Apple ][s were selling for almost $1000 without a display.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There were clones of the Apple ][ for a while, but nobody really bought them except for ultra-hobbyists who wanted more for their $1,800. There were fully-licensed clones of the Macintosh for a while, but contrary to popular belief they weren't doing much to help Apple gain market share. The hardware was sub-par and the people who bought them were existing Mac users and they were only switching to clones because the clone manufacturers could get the latest PowerPC chips into their designs sooner than Apple could. Really all the clones did was eat into Apple's hardware sales.
When are you guys gonna learn? Cloning does not fit Apple's business model. Apple tried cloning, more than once, and it didn't do much to help them then, and it won't help them now. They're moving the Mac OS onto what ostensibly is off-the-shelf Intel hardware and they're still not going to allow cloning. Forget about it.
Breakfast served all day!
You can download VisiCalc from here.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
It is 17K compressed (26K executable).
and does most of what I do with modern spreadsheets (I am a very light user of spreadsheets).
LOL
Apple Confidential. Great book. Gives you much more insight to why things worked out the way they did. I think they have Apple Confidential 2.0 now, but the original was great and the new revision ought to be as well.
...was not spreadsheets. We had those on paper and this was the kind of thing high school computer classes taught towards the end of the last semester as an exercise after writing a basic text editor which was euphamistically referred to as a "word processor" at the time, but most functions dealt with letters, not words. But I digress...
The biggest contribution was the entrenchment of the phenomenon of software spurring hardware and not the other way around. In response to VisiCalc, ever larger character displays were made and they went beyond the usual 40 or 80 all the way to 128 which of course meant that you could not deal with them properly on a standard NTSC monitor. Next thing you knew, you had RGB monitors with higher resolution being pushed that could display the larger character counts.
A lot of Apple 2 display hardware advertisements revolved around how well the product worked with VisiCalc. Sadly, Paul Lutus' AppleWriter ][ didn't fare as well thanks to Apple's lukewarm embrace of it which was sad given that it took until MECC Writer took off for anything to truly outdo it as far as useability versus feature set went and it had a nice minimacro language of sorts for automation.
Today we see a similar phenomenon as vendors write software aimed at the machine which will be current and standard in three years. Except for Adobe which writes theirs aimed at machines which might be standard in five years.
Yup, still trying to strip a system down enough to boot Premiere fast enough to get a seven days of use in a week instead of six because I sacrificed one for the start-up phase.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Here is some info on the implementation of VisiCalc: http://www.frankston.com/?name=implementingVisical c
It's a very interesting article by the other author
Bob Frankston.
65,536 = 2^16 = 16 bits = 2 bytes = unsigned short
Actually, wouldn't the first KILLER app be the Therac-25 controlling software? I mean, it actually did kill people when it malfunctioned. More info
It's either one of greatest accomplishments of engineering or a great folly - your pick :)
-- Sig down
I worked at a computer store in a dinky little town in the midwest, back in the days of VisiCalc. I distinctly remember the shift in the public's attitude towards personal computers when VisiCalc hit the shelves.
Before VisiCalc, people used to struggle with the whole concept of personal computers, and the most common question I got was "WHY would anyone need a computer?" Then after VisiCalc shipped, I could do demos with immediate obvious applicability to any business. The question shifted to "HOW would I apply this computer to my business?"
This was the true start of the personal computer business. Sure, word processing was the killer app for some people, but it offered no real advantages to some people who should have been the core markets, like trained professional secretaries who could bang out a perfect business letter on a Selectric typewriter on the first pass, they saw no speed advantages out of word processing. But when people saw Visicalc instantly add up a column of numbers, and when they saw it instantly recalculate the sums when a number was changed, they GOT it, they immediately saw the advantage over old manual methods. I just loved doing demos, and watching the reactions on peoples' faces.
People also forget that VisiCalc was the core of the first integrated office suites (of a sort), I recall VisiPlot, I think there were some other Visi apps, but I mostly used databases like DBMaster to collate data and export to CSV for use in VisiCalc. It seemed like we had all the computer tools we could ever think of a use for.
Does somebuddy have a wet diaper, hmmm...
If only they made it portable, a little calculating device with maybe buttons and a small screen...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I could be wrong ( cobwebs in the memory banks ) but i do belive there were SNA cards for the PC long before Novell came around..
Id call hooking to a mainframe as 'viable networking'. Considering that is where your email was ( PROFS ) and your *real* applications... ( TSO )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm savin' all of those back issues of "Byte"
Making the micro conversion
I gotta handle text just right
Ya know what I mean?
I took you to a local computer store
Then to a compu-fair shopping spree
There's nothing left to purchase now
'less it's, programmability...
[BEGIN Chorus (invoked later)]
Let's get VisiCalc*, VisiCalc
I wanna get Visi-Calc, let's invoke VisiCalc
Let me hear your modem talk, your floppies squawk
Let me hear your I/O rock...
[END Chorus]
I've used paper, I've used wood
Tried to keep my pen on the table
It's getting hard, this hardware stuff
Ya know what I mean?
I'm sure you understand what eleven's* do
You know the software intimately
You gotta know, you're bringing out
the VisiPlot* for me...
[Invoke Chorus]
* VisiCalc, VisiPlot are TM's of VisiCorp, Inc.
Eleven is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corp.
{ Original material by Randal L. Schwartz }
We're working on making them runtime extensible.
mmmm the price tag?
The latest versions of P2P like Frenet,GNUnet and WASTE implement what Bricklin envisioned in 2000: friend-to-friend networks:
http://www.bricklin.com/f2f.htm
I didn't see this in the linked history, but once in an interview Bricklin (IIRC) said that in the early days they personally demonstrated VisiCalc at trade show booths. Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it now.
You know you've got a "killer app" when members of your target market burst into tears, realizing how much your software is going to change their lives!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Without CP/M, Visicalc would have been limited to one kind of computer. Although the Apple II was pretty popular, it probably wasn't popular enough for Visicalc to have helped spawn an industry. Instead, it was CP/M that enabled software vendors to target Apple II (with an add-on card), TRS-80, Osborne, and the hundreds of CP/M computer brands on the market. That, in turn, enabled Visicalc, WordStar, and Microsoft Basic to get the attention of the likes of IBM, starting the PC revolution and signaling the death of CP/M.
Charles Moore has had some strong words on this.
It takes much effort to create something complex, and it takes a lot more to simplify it.
People do not simplify anymore.
Here we have the promising beginnings of a company that could revolutionize the business market with personal computers. Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so?
Because Apple didn't have the single feature most desired by busines buyers:
The IBM logo.
Apple was a tiny company in California. Who would bet a company on a tiny company run by California hippies? IBM was a huge, century-old corporation in New York. It's salesmen wore suits. It's products were used by the government and by big financial institutions. Given the choice, which would your average pointy-haired MBA choose?
The only companies (besides Apple) that succeeded after IBM entered the market were those that could offer "100% IBM Compatible" systems.
A bit of a Googling will turn up copies of visicalc. It still runs even on WinXP - I tried it a while back. It runs on Linux Wine too, but man, is it ever clunky. It is hard to believe that we raved about it...
Oh well, what the hell...
Mod parent up - he/she/it is absolutely right.
Software patents are a cancer on the industry - the only reason MS DIDN'T patent the fundamentals of the business is even THEY have some shame.
Oh wait, no they don't - they just didn't think of it at the time....
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
Wow! talk about your nostalgia fix. I just downloaded a disk image of Visicalc for the TRS-80 Model IV (dmk image) from Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 website and fired it up on my Xtrs emulator. The really funny part is I still remember how to navigate around in it! :-)
No matter where you go... there you are.
Imagine if the folks that came up with Visicalc had gotten a software patent for it?... Which big software and OS manufacturer wouldn't have a huge chunk of their current profits and wouldn't have at least one of the apps in their office pack?... How might the software landscape be different today?
Probably better. The Visicalc company had innovative interface designs that anticipated modern GUI's. Unfortunately, they were a bit ahead of the hardware, and while they were working on that, Lotus stole their market with a knock-off.
You brought up three reasons: the Apple /// was a poor product, lack of backward compatibility on later products, and lack of cloning.
Concerning the first, I'll agree: Apple could have done a better job on the Apple ///. To their credit, they eventually fixed the ///'s troubles. But by then it was too late.
Concerning the second: remember that no one did backward compatibility back then. Every new machine had completely new hardward, peripherals, language, etc. It wasn't in the culture.
[A note: Actually, Apple did a little bit of it by introducing a disk drive for their previously tape-only machine in 1978, and (gasp!) not introducing a new language ("disk basic"?) to go with it, like everyone else did. Instead, they grafted DOS onto BASIC using the I/O hooks -- and got mercilessly kidded for it for years afterward.]
Concerning the third (cloning): Companies are trying to make money, not create standards that anyone can use. IBM ended up allowing cloning, and they lost control of the product they introducted. Today, no one buys an IBM; they by a Dell, to run Windows. Apple, on the other hand, fought cloning and similar things many times. They ended up with a lower market share, but they retain control of all their product lines to this day. Certainly, we all benefited from IBM clones and what they became, but IBM didn't.
Lastly, I'll add another reason why the Apple II didn't remain the foremost business machine: the market had a high opinion of IBM. The saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was taken seriously. Essentially, only IBM had "permission" to introduce a "serious" business machine. You and I look at technical spec's, but the MBAs didn't (and still don't!). Apple and the others were "toys" no matter what they could do.
And then there are the embarrassing dupes and story descriptions that are just blatantly wrong. In a world where everyone and their dog has one or more blogs, Slashdot is quickly becoming irrelevant.
As an aside, I think comment moderation should be done the same was as meta-moderation: You get 10 random comments to moderate on, instead of cherry-picking them.
This message has been scanned for memes and dangerous content by MindScanner, and is believed to be unclean.
The first Apple ][ clones were sued out of existence by Apple and by the time Laser did a clean room rom the Apple ][ was on the way out. Also Apple came down very hard on any authorized repair centre that worked on clones. // was horrible.
Also the Mac was Jobs baby and my feeling is that he hated the ][ as it was Wozs baby.
Back then Jobs believed users didn't need colour or an open expandible system.
Also with the slow 140 kb drive a GUI on the
There also was a time when a souped up GS was superior to the MAC. Colour, Faster, expendable and the same GUI but Jobs killed the GS in favour of the MAC, its a shame and I'm still pissed off a bit at Jobs for this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I owned two Apple ][ clones in the early '80s, produced by some Taiwanese manufacturer. I got my first programming job writing dBase II aps on an Apple clone with a giant 12" platter 5 MB hard disk. My friends bought Apple ][ clones, except for one early adopter who had a real Apple, and a Commodore dweeb. Apple clones were everywhere - they were cheap, ubiquitous, and probably illegal in the U.S.A., if you've never even heard of them.
Thanks for showing your true colors. Closed source software can have broken dependencies and dlls too.
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,1783104 ,00.asp
Anybody has "prior art" on this?
"You know you've got a "killer app" when members of your target market burst into tears, realizing how much your software is going to change their lives!"
Unfortunately, open source sends people into tears for different reasons.
We had "Franklin" Apple compatibles,(Boston) but shortly after they came out Apple put out a major lawsuit on them. So they were sold for only a short time. There were also "Lasers" and Laser128s sold by Sears I beleive, and they also came out with a PC compatible Laser, using mostly the same hardware. I think one of the reasons Apple abandoning the Apple II line in favor of Macs was because Macintoshes were harder to clone for both technical (AppleROM) and legal reasons.
Visicalc CP/M was good for businesses that already had CP/M machines. From the beginning, Apple appealed to "the rest of us" and Visicalc inspired people to buy Apple IIs as their first computer. Small businesses especially, were intimidated by CP/M machines. Other companies with more resources were waiting for IBM. Its hard to imagine that M$ took the monopoly that should have been IBM's
An OS can't be a killer app. CP/M wasn't much of an OS, either, not like unix. Actually different versions of CP/M weren't compatible, everything had to be recompiled for different versions, and neither source nor compilers were available cheaply. Not to mention the variety of chips and hardware.
The ][ platform wasn't opened up to cloning. Granted, no one, including IBM, was prepared to actually sanction this; the culture back then was of every microcomputer manufacturer having its own hardware, OS, disk format, et cetera - each one dreamed of total domination with its own platform. It took Compaq's sleight-of-hand on IBM to do it. Why was no such cleverness pulled with the Apple ][ platform?
l aser3000.html
Have you ever heard of the Apple II clones such as the Laser?
http://apple2history.org/museum/computers_clones/
1-2-3 v3.0 was, appropriately, a rewrite in C of the previous versions, written in 808x assembler. Regrettably, although it was started in 1986 or so, the effort ignored the fact that there were a) GUI OS's available or on the horizon; and b) greater-than-16-bit address spaces available or on the horizon. 1-2-3 v3.0 was a strict re-implementation of the character-based earlier versions, tied to a 16-bit address space, relying on a horrendous kludge called "extended memory" which mapped a limited number of pages of memory beyond 640K into the app's address space.
When 1-2-3 3.0 was finally released, the best way Lotus could find to add "graphical" capabilities to the product was to acquire a third-party developer that had found a way to reverse-engineer things like text formatting and graphing onto the product by bolting it onto the side.
When Lotus turned its attention to real (and semi-real) GUI environments with >16-bit address spaces (Mac and Windows 3.x, respectively), the "modern" 3.0 code base was hopelessly inadequate to the task, and the implementations suffered accordingly.
There's more (file formats, cross-platform strategies), but, yeah, Lotus did at least as much to kill 1-2-3's dominance as Microsoft did, even given my assertion that Microsoft spoofed Lotus into directing significant effort toward OS/2 (which it did) even as Microsoft was (as I believe) turning its own efforts toward Windows.
I remember this app well.
I used it on an Apple II Plus with 16K RAM (yes you read that correctly, 16 Kbytes, not MBytes).
The spreadsheet could be 255 rows by 243 columns.
This was all done with monochrome graphics on a 12 inch green screen.
Bring back 1978 again.
Michael Shrayer released Electric Pencil (Google HTML cache of a defunct PDF file) in 1976. An architect friend and I saw Electric Pencil demonstrated on an Altair in a Washington, DC computer store in 1977; he was sold on the idea. A poster on the wall showed a man hugging a giant pencil. The slogan: I love my Electric Pencil.
MicroPro released WordStar for CP/M in 1978, a year before VisiCalc was available. Typists of that era will remember some Wordstar's many control key commands, particularly the e-s-d-x diamond (^e for up, ^s for left, ^d for right, and ^x for down). Preface those with ^q to move to the top, side, or bottom of the screen. WordStar was too large to fit into the 16 KB RAM available, so many commands loaded overlays from floppy disk. Fortunately, WordStar buffered keystrokes, so experienced users kept typing at full speed.
Electric Pencil and WordStar sold many computers and Centronics printers long before VisiCalc was born.
Back when I was a younger kid working on my first "turbo" 10mhz XT system, a friend of our family gave me an old TRS-80 Model 4, complete with 8" floppy expansion unit, and an original copy of Visicalc on 8" floppy.
... Should have kept the 8" visicalc original, just for kicks.
Too bad it eventually went to the garbage dump
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Yes, VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet. But we were agog when Lotus announced it would advertise in the WSJ to the tune of one million dollars. (Cue the orchestra, release the laser-equipped sharks.) ("Orchestra", btw, is the word I misspelled in the 4th grade spelling bee.) (Not that I obsessively keep track of my failures, you know.) I cannot overstress the excitement when we read about 1-2-3, it was like meeting a pretty girl who liked programmers (or so I imagine). We had hope.
... little help?
Of course, I still don't know how to save my spreadsheet in CSV format with quotes around every column
Actually, it wouldn't. Patents are 20 years from date of filing (1981 at the latest in the case of VisiCalc), so Visicalc wouldn't have had patent protection since 2001.
Actually, sc was my epiphany (and still does it's job, lo! these many years later!)
was on a smith corona word processor that had a version of visicalc built into it. It let me do things in a spreadsheet that made me go crazy.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I mean, I installed it and it killed my computer!!
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Alright! Alright! I'm leaving already
The original with it's 100% failure rate out of the box did'nt help. But the 3 was basically a suped up 2. Was'nt going to cut it.
IIRC the Apple /// was dead in the market well before the first PC shipped.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"I know this is /. but to even claim an app saved civilisation does serious injustice to the men and women who gave their lives fighting the war. The information helped but armies still had to be defeated with weapons and courage."
The destruction of the U-Boat fleet and the battle of Midway are the best known examples of Allied ambushes in WW2. The Allies were able to entice the enemy into vunerable positions as a direct result of the code breaking abilities of Allan Turing (among others).
Nobody can "do justice" for the casualties of war but the dead are not forgotten, the victims and heros on both sides are honoured in countless memorials, speeches and parades. OTOH: Turing played a key role, "tipping the balance" in the Allies favour. At the very least, his insights prevented countless deaths amongst the front line troops and the merchant navy of the Allies. The "serious injustice" is not the overstatement of Turing's role during the war, the "serious injustice" was the treatment he recieved from a homophobic "civilization" he helped to save.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Dude, you can't get a patent for a program, only for an algorythm,
There is no such thing as an algorythm. However, 100% of programs are technically algorithms. They could prehaps be patented, but it'd be an enormous waste of time (and paper), considering they can be copyrighted anyway.
If you could patent programs, Microsoft would have the entire software industry sewn-up.
No, backwards. If programs were patentable, it would expire in 21 years and they'd become free. Instead, programs are copyrighted, which never expires.
Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so? Here are my thoughts.
1) Backwards compatibility. Apple has a reputation which to this day has not been fixed for marooning owners of older gear. The III wasn't compatible with the II just as the 68000 powered macs were largely incompatible with the PPC units (although the use of emulation mitigated this somewhat) and OSX vs System 9,8,7.
Ironically, Apple has been a true innovator because they are unafraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
Ironically, because Apple doesn't
-- $G
The Apple ][ platform had tons of clones - there were a bunch of unofficial Taiwanese Apple ][ compatibles that ran all the Apple ][ applications (mostly) without any problems. I had one myself during that time. However, all these little clone manufacturers were pretty small shops and never really got their act together as Compaq did.
I'm not even sure that e-mail viruses are a Microsoft original... anybody know?
In my opinion, the first widespread, automatically infecting e-mail virus was the Good Times mail: http://www.cityscope.net/hoax1.html
This mail warned people against a non-existant virus called Goodtimes which allegedly could infect automatically without user interaction.
But the real virus was the warning mail itself. A little different from later e-mail viruses, this virus somehow infected the user's brain instead of his PC and forced him to manually send it to everyone in his address book.
As far as I know, this virus worked on all systems, including Apple and UNIX.
CP/M was the first operating system to be commercially available on a wide variety of computers made by various manufacturers. Any software used standard BDOS or BIOS calls exclusively, and was compiled with 8080 instruction codes ran on any 8080, 8085, or Z80-based CP/M computer. CP/M was a killer app because it gave birth to the personal computer industry we know today, by enabling software vendors to target a huge set of computers. It was highly successful for its time. Don't compare it with things we have today, but for its time, it was revolutionary.
That's not how I remember it. Back then, the Apple ][ was a phenomenally successful computer and the trade magazines at the time really focused on the technical details of the machine. Softalk, for example, regularly ran huge code listings in addition to analysis and tutorial articles, showing you how to do everything from homegrown databases to Double-Hires graphics. I remember reading articles announcing the coming of the Apple /// and the general consensus was, "Um... what are we supposed to do with these?" Even the dedicated Apple /// column in Softalk had a listless air to it, as if the only thing the machine was good for was running VisiCalc and writing simple text-based apps in Basic.
Breakfast served all day!
Excel took over from Quattro, not Lotus or, especially, Visicalc. Excel started its day as Multiplan which nobody used. However, when the combination of WordPerfect and Quattro were dominant, MS started to bundle Word and Excel.
"Excel is probably the best program (other than screensavers) ever written for a microcomputer..."
Actually, Quattro was much better for a long while. But as usual, Excel gaining marketshare over Quattro had nothing with the quality of the two products.
I can't recall the name, but it ran on a Commodore 64. Without that, I would never have justified buying a computer [not being a geek yet], would never have learned how fun they could be, never gotten a job as a multimedia developer... and I only got the thing so I could write freshman college term papers without having to pay for paper and typewriter ribbons. See, the C64 and that app let me delete, and undelete, so I could see what I *might want to write* before I ever committed it to paper -- I saw it as a money saver. That app changed my life.