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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.
...John C. Dvorak were no longer paid to write lame articles?
It is not immoral to create the human species - with or without ceremony, Samuel Clemens.
Dvorak is an idiot. To use the old adage: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
If a bank trusts a spreadsheet based on a bad formula that is provided by the bank itself, is it the spreadsheet's fault? If the CEO chooses that saving 1 cent a year by outsourcing the call center to India, is that the spreadsheet's fault? Please.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Why use MUL/DIV --When you have shifts?
Well, shifts and adds. For multiply.
Shift, subtract, jle for divide. :-)
Also, remember that when multiplying 8 bit numbers with 8 bit registers results in a 16 bit result. Its not as easy.
I wrote a whole 32 bit math package for the Z80 "back in the day."
The only way to get rid of Dvorak is to deny him him the clicks. Don't follow the link.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
I think spreadsheets evolved almost zero in the last 30 years. Word processing got fonts, colors... Excel is just VisiCalc with buttons.
Wrong. In the last 30 years, they've added everything from statistical functions, to greater programmability to data mining functions. Integration with SQL databases. Desktop publishing features.
And not to mention the most important advance in spreadsheets in 30 years.
Yep, that's right. Clippy!
*ducking*
My blog
Oh my goodness, did they really write it in assembler? I always imagined they already used high-level languages at that time.
And nevertheless, the non-availability of multiplication or division is honestly the smallest problem when programming the 6502 in assembler. Using a decent macro assembler it does not take a lot of effort to implement these two instructions. What i personally collided more with where the awkward addressing techniques of the 6502, and, of course, the quite um... limited stack, and of course, having only 3 registers sucked. I liked the Z80 much more form a low-level viewpoint. But in never though about the absence of multiplication instructions as a bad thing, just a little training....
6502 doesn't have jle. It has bcs (branch carry set/greater or equal) and bcc (branch carry clear/less than).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
...Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims...
That which infuriates me the most about the tech sector is corporate executives building wealth upon the backs of laboring engineers. I have yet to receive an explanation as to why some VP somewhere gets to make ten times as much myself. When the company is not making record profits, it is an engineering problem. When we are raking in the dough, it is an executive success. No one ever looks to see how difficult the problem is because, they cannot fathom the problem being solved. My first day at orientation, you could tell the engineers from the financial analysts. We were in Dockers and collars and they were in three piece suits. Where did we go so wrong that support staff are the ones elevated to executive positions? Why is balancing a checkbook a more executive skill than writing the tool that tool used to balance the checkbook?!?
This only thing that disgusts me more is sharing a sentiment with Dvorak.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Then we'd go back to making decisions based on gut instinct, rather than what we do now: have beancounters revise their assumptions until the spreadsheet confirms our gut instinct.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It would be necessary for good journalists to create him?
(Sorry, Voltaire)
My blog
Spreadsheets aren't like guns, they're like methamphetamine.
It starts out innocently enough - a couple sheets here or there - maybe a long weekend working out a household budget. It's all good fun. By the time you realize a problem, though, you're hitting the 65k row limit. You're writing VBA and macros, you're embedding external data sources - and haven't backed up your work for days. It drives you insane and causes brain damage.
Just say no to spreadsheets.
You can do floating point in software, it was done all the time in the 8 bit days, in fact it was done all the time right the way into the 486 days (the 486sx, IIRC, lacked an FPU). It's just not all that fast. But for the size of spreadsheet you could make on a 32K RAM system, the speed of the floating point calculator probably wasn't much of a factor. It wouldn't surprise me if the spreadsheet authors used the BASIC ROM's floating point routine, if it has one (I have no experience with the 8 bit Apple machines. The 8 bit stuff I do play with, like the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro, have floating point calculator routines you can call).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Who'd 've thought :-)
Google for visicalc.com and download from the second link.
BEWARE: DO NOT run it on your main computer. Use a windows virtual machine or dosbox on *nix. It runs perfectly in both even after these years.
- mritunjai
The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices. - Dvorak.
John C. Dvorak is the Ellsworth Toohey of the technology world.
People would stop combining it with godawful macros in an attempt to cobble together a slow and inefficient relational database with no sensible query or reporting tools and use a real RDBM instead.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
The spreadsheet was never invented????
Millions of secretaries -- I mean Admin Assistants -- would have to type department phone lists with word processors.
I am not a crackpot.
And not to mention the most important advance in spreadsheets in 30 years.
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears. Having the spreadsheet program produce charts and graphs for you is the single most important advancement in accounting since language.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Speaking of 6502 programming feats, back in 1982 I worked for Acorn computers in the UK, writing software for the 2MHz 6502 based BBC microcomputer, which incidently we also used as our development machines. The BBC micro had 16K of ROM for the built-in BASIC interpreter and low level "OS", another 16K of address space into which you could map any one (at a time) of the other 16K software ROMs in that machine, and 16K or 32K of RAM depending on the model. Much software was sold on ROM - there were four sockets built-in or you could get expansion boards to allow more - but only one at a time could be selected since there was only 16K of address space for these.
One project I did at Acorn (with another guy) was to implement a Pascal development system for the BBC micro that we crammed into two of these add-in 16K ROMs. This was no cut down version - is was a full-blown ISO certified version of Pascal, the first ever implementation for a Microcomputer to implement the standard and achieve ISO certification (ISO Pascal is different from P-system Pascal which had preceded it).
So, what we fitted into 32K was:
- An ISO Pascal compiler, which compiled programs down to a P-code like stack-based virtual instruction set
- A virtual machine/interpreter for the instruction set
- A 6502 machine code relocator
- The complete Pascal run-time library (full floating point, IO library, heap, etc)
- A full-featured full-screen editor with regex find/replace (with as-you-type syntax parsing and highlighting), block copy/move/delete, etc (in only 4K of code)
- Command line interpreter
Now bear in mind that only 16K of this could actually be in the address space at one time...
The way we managed to squeeze all this in was to have the compiler in one 16K ROM, and the rest in the other. The compiler was written in ISO Pascal and self-compiled to our virtual instruction set. We had to add a few "macro" instructions especially for the compiler in order to get it under the 16K limit. The rest of the software (which I wrote) was all in 6502 assembler. Now consider that to run the compiler you also needed the virtual machine, but that was in a different ROM which could only be mapped into the same address space as the compiler (hence replacing it)... What I did was organize the VM/interpreter into pure code, pure data, and relocatable data (address tables), and implement a 6502 machine code relocator (recognize each instruction type, and know how many byyes they were, and whether they had an address component that needed relocating) which copied the VM out into RAM therefore allowing it to co-reside in the address space with the compiler.
It was a very fun project, not only because of the technical challenge (this was my first job out of college), but also very much because of the memory constraint. I had to use every 6502 trick in the book to eliminate every spare byte to squeeze the assember half of it into it's 16K ROM. Those from this generation may remember things like using XOR A, A as an alternative to LD A, 0 to save a byte, changing tail recursion/calls to jumps (JSR subroutine, RET -> JMP subroutine), taking advantage f known processor flag state to use 2 byte "conditional" (but not if you know the state) branches in place of 3 byte absolute jumps, etc, etc.
Toot toot!
It looks like you are trying to make a standard Slashdot joke at Clippy's expense.
Would you like help?
Forgive me for saying this, but you went "wrong" with your career choice in college. The reason why "support" staff are elevated above you and your fellow engineers (I'm assuming you're an engineer) is that they're administrative support staff, i.e. they are actually trained to run a business (or aspects of the business) and they'll be promoted within the administration of the company; whereas engineers are part of the production team, which means that engineers will probably rise only as far as project or department head. Executives build wealth on the "backs of laboring engineers" (and sales clerks, machinists, programmers, etc) because you're commodities.
I can understand your frustration, but the fact is that in any organization--large, medium, small, corporate, military, religious, political, whatever--there will be only a very few who are able to run the whole thing, and all things being equal, the qualified ones will rise to the top, provided that they're also politically savvy. An unfortunate fact of life is that there also exist within any organization the ass-kissers, toadies, and fast-talking con artists who scheme their way to positions well above their level of competence. Such glaring injustices will rankle obviously, but regrettably the vast majority of people within an organization really don't have a clue how the whole thing works. Forgive me again for saying this, but your post only reinforces this notion; you really don't know what's going on from an administrative standpoint, and I get the strong sense that you are either totally naive about, or disgusted by, organizational intrigue and politics. Good for you, if that's the case. You probably won't get a seat on the corporate jet, but you get to keep your soul.
And I'm certainly not presuming to suggest that engineers cannot run a company; my eldest brother was an engineer who worked at his chosen profession for only about a year after graduating, then went into the financial services industry and took to it like a duck to water. He is now the owner of a successful mutual fund company.
I think that Dvorak is putting too much blame on the spreadsheet: it was just an accelerant on an already-burning fire. As Frank Zappa said when asked, "What do you think happened in this country?"
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
My friend, I wish I had mod points today. Much funnier than the parent post.
This is funny.
But it cuts close to the truth.
Spreadsheet planning wasn't the novelty.
The novelty was that plans could be updated instantaneously - without employing hundreds of clerics and dozens of machines to make it happen.
Dvorak doesn't even know the difference between finance and accounting. Accountants don't really spend a lot of time with spreadsheets. I know because I am a certified accountant myself. Spreadsheets are used far more by finance analysts. Accountants track what happened in the past much like a secretary keeps minutes of a meeting. Finance analysts try to predict what will happen in the future and their main tool is the spreadsheet. These are not normally the same person though there obviously is overlap. Anyone who actually knows anything about business understands the difference but apparently Dvorak is not among them.
Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions
Right, because no one ever made horrible business decisions before the spreadsheet. Sigh... Used properly, spreadsheets let us make more informed, rational decisions instead of shooting from the hip. Modern finance would literally be impossible without spreadsheets or something very much like them. Ever tried to manage a company's books? Without spreadsheets and accounting software you need an army of workers to track the paperwork and calculate the numbers. Furthermore hand calculating results in errors and lots of them. Sure spreadsheets can be used badly like any other tool. They certainly are no magic cure-all for bad analysis and decision making. But that's the user not the tool.
Dvorak asks in the article:
How often in years pastâ"the pre-spreadsheet era, that isâ"did an accountant take over a company?
Frequently. John D Rockefeller was an accountant before he was a titan of industry. There are countless other examples. Accounting is what allows managers of businesses to understand what is going on. Every business manager is by necessity an accountant to some degree. Without accounting they are no different than an airplane pilot without any instruments. It should surprise no one that the people who understand the cash flows best often rise to positions of control, including the role of CEO. A spreadsheet and other computerized tools simply make the job easier and more productive. Apparently Dvorak thinks we should rely on slide rules and multiplication tables and ledger books instead.
Dvorak further asserts:
Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere.
Further evidence of Dvorak's stupidity.
I have worked in a lot of IT positions, and every company I have worked for has always done all of their "real" decision-making on hacked-together spreadsheets. The truth is that the spreadsheet was one of the first "business analysis" tools that was intuitive enough for an end-user to really do power-user things.
That said, Excel and Access "applications" that glue organizations together are the bane of IT's existence. Despite what the sales guys say, all of the company's numbers come out of SAP, Oracle Financials, etc. and into one of these programs to do any useful work with them. I know I'm working on making Office 2007 available to those who want it, and getting some of these Excel and Access 97-era macros carried forward can be...challenging. Access is another horror story -- once a database hits 2 GB in size, file corruption is extremely likely, especially if multiple users are hitting the same database over a network.
If you ever get sick of software development or sysadmin work, and like pain, I guarantee there will be work available for anyone willing to wade through a million lines of VB spaghetti code written by an MBA who took an Excel class in 1996.
I get letters and "announcements" that are Excel documents for some reason.
Turns out the reason is because the user treats the cells as "Tabs" and uses them to "Center" text and "Indent" things, create "Columns"
These people have no clue how to use a Word Processor to format their document and they also have no clue how to use a Spreadsheet program for what it was intended for either.
I know someone else who treats a Spreadsheet like a Database.
Except what they have is a Text File in Excel Format.
No defined fields, can't sort because they typed the info in to "look good" but serial numbers are in Different Columns!
Line Breaks when they reached the end of their 17" screen really hoses the thing good.
Can't export the data to CSV or anything to make it useful elsewhere but "IT'S ALL STORED ON A SPREADSHEET!" which was the original mandate.
I like microcars
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears.
Bleh. We are spatial, visual creatures by nature, graphs make complex and even simple representations of data much easier for everyone. Dunno, where exactly this whole mantra of it just being for stupid bosses came from when graphing functions were created for mathematicians.
--- I do not moderate.
...John C. Dvorak were no longer paid to write lame articles?
What if Slashdot readers didn't submit them? And what if the editors didn't post them? Then, then I wouldn't be compelled to bitch about them here. I could pretend that meat puppet didn't even exist.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Spreadsheets are often used for purposes which go above and beyond their intention, acting in some cases as almost a general-purpose programming environment.
Since this abuse is so common, why not take it to the next level and make a programming language which acts like a spreadsheet?
http://www.subtextual.org/
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears.
Bleh. We are spatial, visual creatures by nature, graphs make complex and even simple representations of data much easier for everyone. Dunno, where exactly this whole mantra of it just being for stupid bosses came from when graphing functions were created for mathematicians.
It's a very ancient meme. The Ancient Greeks and Romans had stock characters of the scheming slave manipulating their foolish masters. I suppose in many ways the readers of slashdot are the galley slaves of the modern world. Joking takes people's minds off the fact that being on call is the modern equivalent of being chained to an oar.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What's your throughput like on that beast?
It's sufficient to handle my 8mbit/s cable connection and the iptables/traffic shaping rules I have setup that go with it. I've never tested it with a local connection to see just how much throughput it can handle but I can easily peg my internet connection without any problems. It has 128 megs of ram and a 8 gig hard drive.
I've thought about replacing it many times but why bother? It consumes around 20 watts and doesn't even require any fans besides the one in the power supply. Any newer computer is going to consume at least two or three times as much juice and be a lot louder.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Hail Clippy, Our Dark Lord!
Hello! I noticed you are using Excel. Do you want to:
o Create a spreadsheet your admins have to fill in for some fire drill information gathering
o Create a CSV formatted file containing all of the employees to be laid off
o Create some graphs with completely meaningless data points
o Use this program as if it was a real database and not a glorified ledger book
It's a very ancient meme. The Ancient Greeks and Romans had stock characters of the scheming slave manipulating their foolish masters. I suppose in many ways the readers of slashdot are the galley slaves of the modern world. Joking takes people's minds off the fact that being on call is the modern equivalent of being chained to an oar.
So wait, you're saying your chains are metaphorical?
I need to talk with HR...
The enemies of Democracy are
The article makes me think of an idea that I believe is found in the book, The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. If it's not there, it's in his earlier book.
The idea is that human thinking is prone to several faults. It's a flaw in the construction of our brain. I believe this is something evolutionary psychology talks about. Anyway, Taleb says that human beings are woefully prone to looking at the past and convincing themselves that past data is a sure guide to what the future will bring. His idea is not just that we are prone to this mistake, but that in effect we love making this mistake -- or perhaps closer to his point, we feel great when we are making this mistake.
Putting Dvorak's article in this context, people look at spreadsheets -- and at all the wonderful graphs and charts you can make from the data contained therein -- and are lured, cognitively, into painting a particular picture of the future. To the natural inclination of our minds, this picture is so beautifully convincing that we have to actively work to resist its charms. It's almost as if we can't help buying into the future our inclinations, with the help of our spreadsheets, sell to us.
This is a small example from what is a larger problem in economics, which only some schools of economics recognize: namely, economic history is a poor guide to the future. (By contrast, the entire field of econometrics posits itself on making "mathematical predictions" based on economic history.)
Dvorak's an ass, in my opinion; but I think he may have stumbled onto something here.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
It's amusing that you don't know how wrong you are.
One of the very first uses of visual representations of data was by Florence Nightingale to Queen Victoria, a chart showing the relative causes of British military deaths in the Crimean war. The whole reason for the chart being that yes, Nightingale thought Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over at a table of numbers and she wouldn't be able to comprehend it.
Graphs of functions may have been created for mathematicians. Charts of data were invented for people whose brains ran out their ears at the sight of numbers.
And no, the spreadsheet is not responsible for all moral decay and infamy in our society.
Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere. At every level of the business scene today, some bean counter does a what-if calculation before making the decisions. The spineless CEO worries about what the shareholders would think if he disagreed with what the spreadsheet and the CFO told him to do. To make him feel better, the board will give the CEO a fat bonus for saving money.
Back in the day, before spreadsheets, the US Military secretly gave the children of US servicemen whooping cough, prisoners were secretly injected with syphillus, and a deal was cut with lead paint manufacturers to leave their remaining inventory on the market rather than recalling it after everyone had given up denying it was harmful. Don't get me started on lead gasoline or cigarettes.
Amoral behavior like this is a property of all *secretive and powerful institutions*. Since the spreadsheet has been invented, private corporations have become more secretive and more powerful, and their directors have become more dedicated to institutional goals as a cultural shift. There is no causation here.
There is a lot of criticism of administrators on this thread - and it is certainly true that the administrators of powerful, secretive institutions tend to personify both the destructive social impact and caustically short-sighted, self-interested purposefully ignorant culture of the institutions where they hold sway.
But as has been pointed out elsewhere, for human beings to act productively and cooperatively, administration and logistics are required. Spreadsheets help with this task immensely - as anyone who's tried to for fucksakes budget a camping trip (how much more would it cost to bring uncle David and his kids too?) can attest.
To clarify my assertion further (and I have to credit this assertion to David F. Noble, who's ideas are primarily reflected here): The technology is neutral - if you don't like what's being done with it, that's entirely the fault of the people using it. To the extent that spreadsheets have had a deleterious effect on our society, that is because powerful individuals saw an opportunity in the technology and exploited it. In a different instutitional structure or with different power relations already in place, the effects would be totally different.
In closing, if anyone actually cares about the future of engineering professions, read Forces of Production by David F. Noble. De-skilled assembly line jobs became the norm not because it was a better way of doing things and not through any inherent properties of machine tools (let alone "market pressure"), but because it served the economic and political interests of the managerical class. Spreadsheets are (relatively minor) among the many tools that the current generation of management tries to use to do the same to engineers today.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
My life as an accountant changed forever that day. It took me three months, and many meeting to get the local division of the major oil company I worked for to buy the first Apple in the company. I seem to recall it was $3,000 or so.
After that it was models and spreadsheets galore - well, whatever was 64k or smaller. ("Oh, you want that calculation? Well, I'll have to remove this one.)
Then on to IBM and Lotus 123 and the rest is history.
Were spreadsheets abused, full of errors, and assumed gospel when they weren't? Sure, but they also made clear, in a very short time, important data used to make good decisions.
Now long retired, that moment in SF remains with me as one of those "ah yes" moments in life.