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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."
". . .to put it another way, what feature of Excel is still a bit clunky to use?"
Its license.
KFG
::
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
And this is news because...?
Visicalc still runs on all of them.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
ronic, when you think about it: The first killer app, the reason computers first got built, the app that saved civilization,
/. 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.
I know this is
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Don't laugh, I think you're right.
;-)
My first exposure to "what a computer can do" was a big tractor-feed printout of ASCII porn - naturally it was created on a highly expensive, tax-dollar funded university mainframe
I bet ASCII porn was the one thing many early geeks brought home to show their non-tech buddies
http://request-header.info
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
...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)
There is still hope, no "insightfull"s - yet.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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.
The second world war has several key events that are, literally, that black and white. Any one of them literally had civilization hanging on them:
Had Hitler refused Goering's request to use the Luftwaffe to destroy the British at Dunkirk, the British army wouldn't have escaped, Hitler would have walked in to England in 1940, RAF or not, and, from a consolidated Europe would have likely beaten Russia.
Had the Luftwaffe not switched to city bombing, the RAF was literally down to its last day of fighter strength. Without that switch, Eagle day would have gone ahead and the above remained true.
Had Hitler taken Vicini's advice and never gone up against a Sci... never started a land war in Asia... and finished Britain first, it may well have been a very different war.
Had Hitler knocked out Britain in 1940, the British wouldn't have had the next two or three years of nuclear weapons research that formed much of the basis of the Manhattan Project. Most likely, with Britain out and thus no staging post for U.S. attacks, Germany would have had the bomb long before the U.S. You may recall, they allied with the Japanese against the U.S.
Had Bletchley not existed, had they not had the bombes, had Turing and other geniuses not worked there, had they failed to crack the Enigma, the U-Boats would have continued in the Atlantic pretty much without limitation. Sending troops and arms to England would have been a near impossibility under those conditions, pulling pressure off the Western front long enough for Germany to have a significantly different war in the East. Same situations as above then happening.
The truth is that many people died (and many more risked but didn't - I'm always bemused how dying is more heroic than being willing to) and, yes, without them the victories couldn't have happened. Similarly, without that one app, most likely, the victories couldn't have happened either.
No one thing won the war on its own. Many individual things, in their absence, would have been enough to have lost it.
Thus, claiming an app saved civilisation is true. As is claiming Goering's stupidity did. As is claiming the D-Day ruse did. As are countless other totally valid claims. And, yes, behind all of them, there were masses of individuals fighting and dying.
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.