Yesterday, Claire asked for help with a spreadsheet that someone had sent her. It may not have been the worst spreadsheet I’ve ever seen, but it was easily in the top two. It was written in some version of Excel — the acknowledged “king” of spreadsheets for personal computers. I personally never liked Excel — since I’ve retired, I like it even less. When I was working, I had to use it fairly often and I tolerated it then. Since I’ve been retired, I’ve used Numbers — a Mac spreadsheet. For my purposes, it far exceeds Excel — in every way that matters to me.
But that’s not what this blog is about. After a lot of work to make the spreadsheet Claire received useable for her, I got to thinking…. Electronic spreadsheets are relatively new — a spread sheet was probably the first “useful” program that I remember for a personal computer.
As far as I know, VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet computer program for PCs. It was originally released to run on the Apple II computer. (VisiCalc got it’s name because it acted like a “visible calculator.”)
Dan Bricklin dreamed up ViciCalc while watching a presentation at Harvard Business school. Dan teamed up with Bob Frankston and they formed the Software Arts company. Together, they developed the VisiCalc program in two months — during the winter of 1978-79. Both Dan and Bob were familiar with many row/column financial programs. These programs were really no more than report generators — some of the better known were Business Planning Language (BPL) and Foresight. However, none of the programs were completely interactive and they were used prior to the personal computer era.
VisiCalc was marketed as “a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations and allows the user to just solve the problem using familiar tools and concepts.”
VisiCalc hit the market in mid-1979 and sold for under $100. It required an Apple II computer with 32K of RAM and supported saving files to a magnetic tape cassette or to Apple’s Disk II floppy disk system.
The program was unusually easy to use and came with excellent documentation. By 1982, VisiCalc’s price had risen from under $100 to $250 and competitors, like Super Calc and Multiplan had come on the market.
In 1983, Lotus Development Corporation came up with Lotus 1-2-3. It was designed to be as compatible as possible with VisiCalc, including the menu structure — to allow VisiCalc users to easily migrate to 1-2-3.
Lotus 1-2-3 was more powerful than VisiCalc and was almost immediately successful. By 1984, sales of VisiCalc were declining rapidly. The magazine InfoWorld wrote that VisiCalc was the first successful software product to have gone through a complete life cycle, from conception in 1978 to introduction in 1979 to peak success in 1982 to decline in 1983 to a probable death in 1984.
By 1985, Lotus Development acquired Software Arts and ended sales of VisiCalc.
So another trip down memory lane… after struggling with Claire’s spreadsheet, I guess I was longing for the good old “simpler” days. Of course remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were….
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