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Interview With Spreadsheet Creator
Gammu writes "Dan Bricklin helped create one of the most successful computer metaphors of all time, and he never got rich. He, and another engineer, started Personal Software to create the computer spreadsheet VisiCalc, which established the Apple II as the standard microcomputer for small businesses and attracted the attention of IBM to the market. Josh Coventry recently interviewed Bricklin about VisiCalc and his newer projects, including a Wiki-style spreadsheet." WikiCalc was discussed back in February on Slashdot and reviewed by NewsForge in March. NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
I only wish good ideas and good engineering had more to do with making a fortune than they do. Don't get me wrong, it does happen, and perhaps more in the US than anywhere else. But still, most of the money normally goes to whoever already has enough money to advance the innovator a paycheck so they can develop the idea. (Of course engineering wage slavery still beats pushing a plow 9 times out of 10!)
This is not an example of Microsoft screwing someone. It is an example for the anti-patent free software crowd on what happens when you don't patent something: a big company like Microsoft can come in and do it better (or at least market it better) than you. They make billions and you don't.
People who have talent don't get rich.
People who organize talent get rich.
Since most of us on slashdot are havers, rather than organizers, we sense this as some sort of deep injustice, or dark irony. But really it's just a practical necessity. The organizers are the ones with the power to determine who gets paid what, so they naturally pay themselves the most. If you want that money, then become an organizer instead.
Not to diminish your post, but from my understanding Visicalc is one of the applications Microsoft uses as a baseline for backwards-compatibility testing. The fact that it still runs in 2006 is more a testament to the efforts of OS designers than the original program-- the original program only had to follow all the published specs of the time.
Comment of the year
Imagine if patenting software was the thing back then.
It's an impressive technical acheivement, sure, but does it actually make the operating system better?
Some people would argue that insisting on backwards compatibility is the cause of many of the problems involved with practical Windows usage today. One of the major examples of this is how inconvenient it is to run as a non-admin class user. If Microsoft had laid down the law in NT from the beginning and made it very abnormal to run with admin powers day-to-day some (not all) of the security problems would not be an issue today. Even in Vista today lots of people still want to run with full powers. If Apple can break compatibility as often as they do and get away with it Microsoft can, too. People will rewrite useful and necessary programs, and make them better. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds (Emerson)! Unixes generally have a tradition of source compatibility rather than binary compatibility, which has its own problems; insert Plan 9 rallying cry here.
Certainly most of Windows' security problems, especially recently, come from it being the majority computing platform among the human race, a notoriously easy-to-exploit class of security vulnerabilities. But all their work towards binary compatibility certainly hasn't helped.
Maybe in a home computer store you were selling more cheaper ones. (By current standards, corrected for inflation, all these were extremely expensive.) I did a lot of temp jobs in banks during the immediate pre-IBM-PC era, and the only personal computers I ever saw were Apple II. They were usually controlled by ubergeek types (before the term was invented) when most people who had computer access had terminals to the IBM mainframes. These people had the knowledge that Visicalc would help them and the clout to get someone to pay for the computer, and the same logic about familiarity and price that led to rooms full of IBM-brand equipment would lead to buying Apple for PCs at that time. Just one person's sample, but I did work a lot of different locations over several summers.
The point of including the basic superclasses in the OS is that every user, any program they use, gets the same, consistent interface (if the developers want to use it). This is not a question of whether office apps are available to users, but whether developers can rely on the same classes and interfaces, to reuse the same code and skills for the same use patterns across any apps.
Users don't need to understand RDBMS or anything else. That's the job of the developers who reuse the OS office components.
At this stage it would be great for Linux for OO.o to factor out their components into 3 tiers, and allow other apps' install packages to depend on installing the office components. OO.o apps themselves could be lightweight glue/shells, a reference platform. The reuse of their components in most other apps (like a wordproc in this panel in which I'm editing this post in Firefox) would increase the userbase for their dedicated office apps.
If OO.o can deploy reusable components like that in the next 18-24 months, before desktop Linux gets defined in the market with a fragmented office base, Linux could jump way past Windows, OSX and other competitors. And we'd all be a lot less schizo as we jump between different apps with similar features but which use different components.
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make install -not war
Though I can understand why people get paid to say or write that, I find it difficult to accept that anyone actually believes that. It doesn't work that way even in theory:
Maybe just maybe Bricklin could have gotten the concept of electronic spreadsheet accepted by the USPTO. But getting there to the initial product, he would have tread on dozens of patents utilized countless algorithms and concepts from Computer Science curricula and industry best practices which are owned by portfolio companies. They would have eaten his lunch even with cross licensing.
Here's a quote from your leader around 1994:
'nuff said.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.