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

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.

Comments

Here's a new one from me

[TheHaikuLover]

His erect penis,
Plugged into a man's anus.
He is a faggot.

Excel is a bit like SAP

[vikingpower]

Users galore, in their thousands and millions, but no one really loves it. At least - did you ever hear one say "I love Excel" or "I love SAP" ?

Current version is just .... so..... slow....

[thegreatbob]

All current office products (2013) seem to be designed to be horrendously slow. Excel suffers most terribly from all the graphical bloat. Even after disabling the "animations" and "hardware acceleration", it's still a barely-responsive lump on anything that isn't a top-notch workstation/gaming PC. No amount of tweaking seems to be able to fix it, leading me to believe that it is broken by design. Whoever thought that flashy animations should be enabled in a "productivity" suite by default should be condemned to an appropriate level of hell. The lack of benefit from hardware acceleration on low to mid-range hardware (trivial even on higher end stuff) should call into question the competence of many involved.