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

Re:Instruction set.

[WillKemp]

Oh my goodness, did they really write it in assembler? I always imagined they already used high-level languages at that time.

Of course they already used high level languages in those days - on mainframes. But there just wasn't the program storage space on 6502-based machines in those days. You could create a much smaller and more efficient program in assembler than you could in COBOL or Fortran or something.

We didn't even use a high level language on the PDP11. But Macro11 was a million times better than the crappy 6502 assembler i had to work with back in 81!