30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

Comments

I have a question

[larry bagina]

mod me offtopic but... what the fuck is wrong with his head? It looks like somebody stuck it in a vice and gave it a few turns (that would explain his "logic"...). Does he have John McCain cancer or something?

it was harder than you think

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

i've read an article about visicalc once that said because apple II didn't have an interrupt handling system, they had to fill the code with breaks to simply read the keyboard.

wild ride that one...