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."

Comments

What?

[einstienbc]

I thought the first killer app was email?

Re:What?

[gauger22]

networked computers weren't the norm back then. People did back ups onto dozens of floppy disks one at a time.

Re:What?

[ScrewMaster]

What do you mean, floppy disks? We used audio cassettes.

Re:What?

[canuck57]

I thought the first killer app was email?

Not for a Microsoft MS-DOS PC it wasn't. These PCs didn't even have any other viable networking option with the OS until Novell came along. Microsoft didn't really get much networking until Windows 3.0 and it was a hacked up mess. So how could a PC transmit email? It didn't unless you loaded Novell with ccMail or some other similar infrastructure add in. Novell got a start here as people were tired of copying to floppies (sneakernet).

VisiCalc, SuperCalc and later Lotus was the rage that drove the PCs in business. For home, but shorty after business it was Procomm to a local Fido BBS or perhaps to a UNIX system running mmdf or uucp. For PCs, email was second or perhaps third.

The raw fact of the mater is Microsoft has invented nothing but FUD. Every technology they use or sell has been borrowed from someone else, except perhaps for NETBIOS that no one wants to use any more. The only thing really innovative about Microsoft is the strong arm marketing tactics used to create a monopoly. History of the technology is best gotten from more neutral sources than Microsoft that would have you believe they invented the internet.

So I hope you were being funny.

Re:What?

[mog007]

What about solitare?

Re:What?

[DustCollector]

>>So how could a PC transmit email? It didn't unless you loaded Novell with ccMail or some other similar infrastructure add in.

Well, there was the serial port and a Hayes Modem. A popular communications app was a shareware one: ProComm. Email was available via Compuserve, a BBS, perhaps a university, and later AOL.

So the PC could send and receive email. It just wasn't a straightforward thing to set up, at least for the business types.

Re:What?

[mikael]

Atari Cassette Recorder

Sharp MZ80K

ZX Spectrum +2

Each cassette typically had a play/recording speed of 300 baud. So a 32K program would take around 15 minutes to load.

And you hoped that your tape would never stretch or shrink due to usage or changing weather conditions. Not forgetting having to maintain a log of where the tape counter was when each program was saved to tape.

Re:What?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Umm...guys, VisiCalc first came out on Apple ]['s, not MS-DOS PC's. I worked at Apple during those years, and nearly every unit we sold was because of that app. 8086 PC's came in much later on in the piece. We were working on our first duck quack synthesizer when IBM brought out their competitor -- the one with the heavy steel plate in the keyboard to make it feel more solid (closest they could come to those big iron plates they put in the base of their mainframes).

Re:What?

[timeOday]

Microsoft didn't really get much networking until Windows 3.0 and it was a hacked up mess.

I clearly remember that early OEM installations of Windows 95 did NOT come with TCP/IP installed, even though "networking" (IPX) was installed. Microsoft was still hoping the Internet would never take off without its help, because they preferred the model of selling CDROMs for everything.

Re:What?

[hairyfeet]

Please don't remind me.Oh the pain that those evil things were.And stretching and skrinkage weren't the only worries.I gave up learning about computers for nearly ten years because of those things

I had just spent ten hours writing and saving an accounting program for my dad and another six writing a cool four player pong style game before going to bed.Saved and logged everything on tape.Next day i fire up the Vic20(God,I'm old!) and nothing- zip.I pop the tape in the tape deck to check it and hear--"Karma Chameleon".My sis pops in and says-" I found this tape by your computer and it was full of noise so i recorded something good on it for you".Too bad killing ones sister is illegal.:-0

I got back in when the came out with cdrw back in 98.Thank God for the guy that invented write once cds!Finally sister proof tech!

Re:What?

[mikael]

The distribution of gwbasic and basica was probably more to compete against the home computers of the time. I was still programming on an Atari 800XL back in 1986, simply because the PC clones back at that time (8 MHz) only had CGA graphics.

Back in those days, every magazine from Byte to Personal Computer World, and all the home computer magazines had science, encryption (implement DES crypt on your TRS-80!) and game programming articles.

Surprisingly

[Carthag]

it turns out VisiCalc looked more like a giant chick than a lizard.

Right on!

[BWJones]

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.

Re:Right on!

[Sponge Bath]

...one of the first programs I bought for my Apple ][+ back in 1982

Why didn't you just download the torrent?

Re:Right on!

[Lars T.]

There is still hope, no "insightfull"s - yet.

Given the demographics of users back then ...

[cpu_fusion]

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!"

Re:Given the demographics of users back then ...

[Anonymous Luddite]

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

The spreadsheet lineage

[BeerCat]

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)

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 .wks and, to some extent .wk3 files to ease transition.

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?

Re:The spreadsheet lineage

[kfg]

". . .to put it another way, what feature of Excel is still a bit clunky to use?"

Its license.

KFG

A Dupe.

[k-zed]

And here is the original article :)

Simply amazing, Slashdot is these days.

My vote goes to "Cracking Enigma"

[nick_davison]

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.

Re:My vote goes to "Cracking Enigma"

[Timesprout]

ronic, when you think about it: The first killer app, the reason computers first got built, the app that saved civilization,

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.

Re:My vote goes to "Cracking Enigma"

[nick_davison]

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.

Re:My vote goes to "Cracking Enigma"

[Minna Kirai]

Hitler would have walked in to England in 1940, RAF or not, and, from a consolidated Europe would have likely beaten Russia.

Basically true, but not quite that much. A solid Dunkirk victory would still not've been enough to give Hitler a military landfall on Britain before 1947. It would've destroyed the RAF to the point where the Luftwaffe could have air superiority over every UK port, rendering an American landing in France impossible... but

Had the Luftwaffe not switched to city bombing, the RAF was literally down to its last day of fighter strength.

You are repeating optimistic Nazi propaganda that was disproven a week later. That is, at best, a big exaggeration. The urban targeting was a mistake, but by itself wasn't what sealed the Luftwaffe's fate. If it had been avoided, the RAF would've pulled their airstrips 50mi north, reducing their response time and increasing bombing effectiveness to the tune of thousands more deaths, but that's still far from decisive.

No one thing won the war on its own. Many individual things, in their absence, would have been enough to have lost it.

If some of those things had combined to "lose" the war, it would still have been won later. By 1949 or so, the fruits of the Manhattan Project would turn Berlin into an atomic wasteland. (Probably after a dozen other bombs had smashed Wehrmarcht strongpoints on the way into Europe)

news..

[b100dian]

Slashdot. News for teens. Stuff that mattered.

How would software patents have changed our today?

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

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....

Apple's chance to get the business market stymied?

[Faust7]

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.

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 ///. 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?

- 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?

Doing useful work in not much space

[Bushcat]

I'd forgotten that Visicalc was less than 30k. Elite for the Beeb Micro was minute in modern terms. The two computers that made all my money for me in the early days were the Osborne 1 and later the HP200LX. In both cases, it was the bundled software which sold them to me. I can't remember how large the Osborne's applications were, but they were less than a 183kB floppy each, anyway. I keep trying to reuse the HP200LX, but my eyes just aren't up to it now.

The most recent software install on my current notebook was 1.8GB.

Pages, Keynote, where is [Calculate]?

[DaveRexel]

::
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.

Re:Pages, Keynote, where is [Calculate]?

[brentyl2]

I'll jump in with some speculation here. I remember reading here on /. a while ago that Apple had trademarked the term Numbers. That would fit their naming schema perfectly for a spreadsheet, so maybe... They have a spreadsheet already as part of AppleWorks, but it is crufty and OS 9ish. Using the underlying technology, however, I would think it would not be terribly hard to release an OS X spreadsheet as part of the iWork suite. My work certainly includes more than page layout and presentations, so the spreadsheet would be most welcome. I suspect this would be true for most of us here. If Apple would also modernize the database included in AppleWorks, they would have a truly viable alternative to Office. Pages and Keynote both do a good (not perfect) job of importing and exporting .doc and .ppt files, so it's reasonable to assume Numbers and [Database] would do the same with their MS Office counterparts. I will leave the arguments about whether Keynote or PowerPoint is "better", or Pages v. Word, to others - to each their own. I will just say, Choice is good.

first text processing and now spreadsheet

[lonedroid]

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 !?

They have to get other things right first

[Noksagt]

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?

I love and use Gnumeric. I sometimes use OO.o sheet.

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.

Huh?

[Zebra_X]

And this is news because...?

If by "better" you mean "more wrong"

[Noksagt]

As a hardcore spreadsheet user

You should be using Gnumeric.

excell handles curve fits much better than open office,

Here, I assume you mean "easier."

and it statisical anaylis of data is much better also.

Please see these reports on unfixed bugs in Excel. I've seen similar documents (which compare to other commercial software, such as Origin, Kaleidagraph, Profit, etc.) Hardcore spreadsheet users have zero tolerance for error & many consciously avoid excel.

Say what you will about DOS/Win3.1/98/ME/NT/2k/xp

[syntap]

Visicalc still runs on all of them.

http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

Re:How would software patents have changed our tod

[realmolo]

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.

A1

[Doc Ruby]

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.

They did all that

[PCM2]

Why did they not simply pursue a GUI for the ][ series instead of branching off with a completely different product?

You make it sound like they quit making the Apple ][ series when they started working on the Apple ///. Not so. The Apple /// was simply a new product line developed with business use in mind.

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.

VisiCalc's major contribution...

[suitepotato]

...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.

Therac-25

[crutchman]

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

I remember selling Visicalc

[sakusha]

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.

iPod killer

[zpok]

If only they made it portable, a little calculating device with maybe buttons and a small screen...

VisiCalc Song

[FunkSoulBrother]

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 }

Gnumeric row/col limits

[Jody Goldberg]

We're working on making them runtime extensible.

My favorite VisiCalc story

[PapayaSF]

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!

CP/M was a killer app that enabled Visicalc

[n2rjt]

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.

Re:Gnumeric stability/usability

[drsquare]

Let's see:
"Open source software is just as user friendly as closed-source software." - Standard claim on this site.
"Sure you have your dependencies right?" - AC.

Those two sentences don't add up.

Re:CP/M was an OS, not an app

[bubbaD]

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.