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Recalc Or Die: Excel 1.0 Developers Celebrate Their Baby's 30th Birthday

Posted by timothy on from the somebody's-gotta-love-it dept.

theodp writes: This weekend, reports GeekWire, many of the original Excel team members are getting together to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the software's release. "We certainly ripped some stuff off," acknowledged Microsoft Excel 1.0 lead developer Doug Klunder, "but we also did some things that nobody else had done at the time and probably hasn't done since — some of which are really insane, and some of which turn out to be pretty handy." Klunder, who was responsible for Excel's killer "intelligent recalc" feature, quit his job after Bill Gates decided to shift the original Excel project from MS-DOS to the Mac, but ended up coming back and finishing the project after an ill-fated stint as a farm worker in the lettuce fields of California. "Just imagine having this product where one of the key components of it is really only understood by this guy who will quit routinely and go be a migrant farm worker down in California," said Excel 1.0 program manager Jabe Blumenthal. "It was not necessarily the most traditional or stable of environments." Many of the original Excel team members still use the program today — the RSVP sheet for this weekend's party was an Excel Online document. Before a professional naming firm came up with "Excel," the software was known by its code name "Odyssey", and other product names considered by Microsoft included "Master Plan" and "Mr. Spreadsheet." By the way, "Mr. Spreadsheet" makes his MOOC debut next week in edX's free-to-audit Excel for Data Analysis and Visualization course.

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Visicalc was world-changing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Lotus 1-2-3 was pretty cool, and Excel excels at novel ways to silently corrupt my data. :-(

    1. Re:Visicalc was world-changing... by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes. Don't ever let Excel touch your csv files. For example, if you open a csv file with Excel and then save it again, it will have converted cells containing (large) numeric IDs to scientific notation. Without asking. Bye, data.

      Converting "JAN10" and "MAR10" to dates was also pretty creative, changing like 5 entries in a list of many thousand codes. Silent, subtle data corruption is so fun. At least with the scientific notation it's pretty obvious your data has been fucked.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  2. Re:Excel is a bit like SAP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Excel did the job just fine until the ribbon UI came and MS decided that all those useless icons are more worth than the cells in spreadsheet. And since the file-menu started opening the full-screen crap, it was time for me to move on to alternatives which actually are now better than the Excel itself. After ms-office started using only two shades of grey as its UI, many are really forced to move the alternatives, as the UI is really too uncomfortable to use for a day.

  3. VBA Anonomys by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I admit it. I like Exel. I especially like VBA. Why on earth would I like VBA you ask?

    I spent a long time working in a department highly reliant on statistics calculated from a lot of data. Many many tables of data used to generate and analyze other data. Working for a daily cheap company, MS office was all we were given to do the job.

    We were not permitted to write custom apps or to install other software. The only sort of programmability we had was VBA. Some of the things we built too processes from being multi-day work to a matter of minutes letting VBA automate the tasks.

    If you're not in a position where you can have a custom app developed to handle and calculate/manipulate large amounts of data, automating calculations already stored in spreadsheets is a life saver...