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Meet the Guy Who Holds the Guinness World Record For Collecting Spreadsheets (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: Ariel Fischman, a financial advisor in Mexico City, has been using spreadsheet software for 30 years. And in recent years he's been collecting it: VisiCalc, 1-2-3, Excel, Quattro, and lesser lights in their once-familiar boxes, in a dizzying array of variants stretching back to the 1970s. Last year, Guinness World Records certified that his collection is without peer. I recently spoke to him about it -- starting with the obvious question -- Why spreadsheets? -- for Fast Company.
Else they'd have spread!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And I thought stamp collecting was the world's geekiest hobby, we have a new winner!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
He's collecting spreadsheet software.
Bringing a graphical spreadsheet with graphing capability on a 64 was a tour de force. Not mentioned in this article?
Here's a weird little web page about it
http://geowriter.blogspot.com/...
So, which spreadsheet program does this guy use to organize and manage his collection?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Because its tech related. Because a Guinness Book record is interesting in a light-hearted way. Cause the guy could actually speak intelligently about his hobby and tie it to the history of the mundane yet important market of consumer software?
Exactly how much time does it take for one to ignore a slashdot article?
Clearly he does it to impress the ladies
Supercalc or go home.
He doesn't always drink Beer but when he does he drinks Dos Equis!
You could then add Lotus Jazz. Underwhelming box, underwhelming product.
But a retailer in my home town had the ultimate product box in the window for years, fading into violet obscuring - Modern Jazz.
They got the box for display, but the product never shipped. that's a rare item.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
People collect rocks, so why not spreadsheets?
No mention of either sc (spreadsheet calculator) or scim (spreadsheet calculator improved). Heathen!
It's mostly online only. Even if you can find a box with a cd or dvd in it, it probably requires online activation. I still have my games (and other things) from years-gone-by, and if I install them from the distribution disk they still work. How is anyone going to be able to do that with anything released in the past decade or so... modern games are going to be quickly forgotten.
Spreadsheets...everywhere. Of all kinds, doing all kinds of evil. There are still some embedded because no one can figure out how they actually work or what the numbers actually mean, only that they need to compare new numbers against old numbers in one capacity or another.
I drink a lot.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
... someone has to do it.
for preserving a slice of software history. Not only has he collected a rich historical collection preserving the evolution of spreadsheet software, but from the article he's also interviewed and corresponded with the software pioneers from the field, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s now, preserving their historical testimony. Without him an important part of software history might otherwise have been forgotten. I suspect his collection, and his research into the field, will be an invaluable archive for those interested in computing history. It's a shame that his interest in preserving software history is being met with more mockery than support by the slashdot community.
A site that nulls the whole webpage if you block any ads.
Wonderful.
I'm already too late to view the source.
I'll stop blocking ads when you stop using abusive ads.
Need I say more?
Posting a comment on an inane article on Slashdot: priceless
Ok, the Guinness World Records have become a bit ridiculous, registering records for some very trivial things, but at least this guy is not collecting "spreadsheets", but boxed spreadsheet software. He has over 500 according to the "strict" record parameters, or 800 otherwise.
It's still rather trivial of course, when I was a kid (almost 3 decades ago), I had asked for the Guinness Book of records for christmas and enjoyed reading about the tallest man, the fastest animal etc, but the biggest spreadsheet software collection is nothing like that. I mean, you could have thousands of records under the category "biggest xx software collection", or things like "biggest kellogs cerial box collection" etc. Maybe I should also apply, I have the worlds biggest "software written by myself" software collection...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I concur with you entirely, but I think there is a snicker-and-giggle factor here for this guying specializing in collecting spreadsheet programs.
John Trimmer self-published the book How to Avoid Huge Ships and every online reference to this rare book is filled with jokes. How do you avoid huge ships? Simple, don't cross their paths, and so on. Trimmer's book, however, was pitched towards the captains or operators of small vessels such as fishing boats and pleasure craft, who indeed give gray hairs to the captains and pilots of tankers and container ships that must traverse the same coastal waters and harbors. Maybe it is like pedestrians and motorists cutting in front of trains, where it doesn't register that a train cannot stop on a dime and neither can one of those huge ships.
The book tries to explain from the perspective of a former harbor pilot why it is not a good idea for a small boat to cut in front of a huge ship, and this explanation is necessary because I lot of small boat operators do just that. I am not able to get ahold of this book so there may be more to it than that -- maybe a small craft can get sucked into the bow wake of a much bigger ship and Captain Trimmer gives instructions on how to stay clear?
This collection of spreadsheet programs is a historical treasure, and spreadsheet software is one of the most used apps on small computers. But spreadsheet software is not kewl and computer users who do stuff with spreadsheets instead of writing custom Perl scripts are not leet, hence all of the jokes and people placing this poor man on the autism spectrum.
There are all kinds of uses for a modern spreadsheet program, even for an engineer -- producing tables and figures for reports, formulating budgets.
My main use is for quick data visualization. Run a program in Eclipse that generates tab-separated numeric output, paste the numbers into Excel, select columns of data and view the resulting plot. The flexibility of such software saves having to write a GUI for every program that generates engineering data.
Because its tech related.
Barely. It's just collecting. Everything can be interpreted as being tech related. Way to lower the bar.
Because a Guinness Book record is interesting in a light-hearted way.
Not really.
Cause the guy could actually speak intelligently about his hobby and tie it to the history of the mundane yet important market of consumer software?
So what.
Exactly how much time does it take for one to ignore a slashdot article?
Ah. Missing the point completely. This really shouldn't be on /. and we shouldn't need to skip over it.
Unless he images that software to durable media like archival DVDs it can be lost as the floppies deteriorate. Lose one of a set and you're screwed.
Back in the proverbial day we used Winimage which is (amazingly) still available. https://www.winimage.com/
Of course Linux users have other options like dd.
If you collect old software do yourself a favor and image it immediately so you'll have more than the packaging and a useless floppy in the future.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
/sarcasm Silly me, I forgot digital hoarding is "news."
Does he have them printed out on his bed sheets?
He made his shopping lists with them for 40 years, like most users.
And computing today: the people who work on making sure LibreOffice can import old and obscure file formats should encourage him to share his collection with the world by uploading these executables to archive.org so the old programs can be run on emulators. Generating spreadsheet files with old software, doing the reverse engineering on the files, and making LibreOffice better (via the Document Liberation work, I imagine) would help the public and improve free (as in freedom) software at the same time. It would be great to be able to tell someone with, say, old Amiga and old MS-DOS spreadsheet programs that they can load their old files into something modern like LibreOffice Calc or Gnumeric and help them switch to a modern supported operating system that won't be a nuisance to maintain.
A sentiment I've maintained for years; try reading just about any /. story (they virtually all have something to do with software freedom) and see how frequently the audience here supports proprietary software yet they also lament DRM schemes (which are impossible without proprietary software). These posters also have nothing to say when some proprietor uses their unjust power over the user (such as the time a proprietary flight simulator developer installed stored password readers+uploaders on all of their clients computers without the user's knowledge or consent). This is reinforced by the censorship system known as "moderation" which carries multiple ugly biases that stymie reasonable conversation. Fortunately not all /. readers and posters express such ignorance and eschew software freedom.
Digital Citizen
What's wrong with Eclipse? OK, OK, it is not yet compatible with OpenJDK 11, but I was able to scrounge up OpenJDK 10?
You sure he didn't publish a book about circumcision?
You've won "Largest Collection of Whistleblowers Locked in Your Embassy". At least there's that!
There was a lot to be excited about in the earlier days of spreadsheets. What we take for granted these days wasn't always the case. Boeing created their 3D one and then sold it (This guy has it in his collection).
Is this a collection of FUNCTIONing software? i.e. has means to read the media, the media is still fully readable, and means to execute/run the software?
Did they check that he has or still has the legal right to the software? Some of them could not have ownership transferred or needed written permission of OEM or even license expired after certain period of time.
I have extensive software collections also, but many of them are no longer usable, only physical artifact of what was.
I bet he doesn't have copies of the spreadsheet applications I created by hand or within other non-spreadsheet applications
when they asked him what he saw as the current competation to Excel, he mentioned some software (i never heard of) but not LibreOffice Calc.
But you might want to know that he has no real interest in preserving or running most of the software.
Excel keeps adding features, not innovating. Too bad that Lotus didn't promote Improv or get it out sooner. Too bad that their 3D "page" model didn't prevail over Excel's very sloppy asynchronous sheet model. At least we're not still stuck with the ludicrous 64k row sheets that limited Excel for a decade too long. Excel's innovation was the ability to easily get pretty output. Products like Lucid3D and Javelin were the sources of real innovation. Too bad. And I agree with others here: too bad the article's author doesn't know the difference between a spreadsheet and a spreadsheet software application.