[HN Gopher] The History of VisiCalc ___________________________________________________________________ The History of VisiCalc Author : damir Score : 60 points Date : 2023-06-08 05:48 UTC (17 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.bricklin.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.bricklin.com) | booleandilemma wrote: | The website and the cover of the linked book Serious Play | (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0875848141/softwgarde...) | have such a 90s vibe, it's making me nostalgic. | b33j0r wrote: | Killer site (not a "read") about the thing that created the term | killer app. This meant, you bought the hardware because you | wanted the software. | | At the risk of being a hypeman, I think you should take a look. | Just for funsies (though I'd gladly sell you a visicalc license). | | It's weird like it's from 1999, but visicalc was even 10 years | before that. I thought this page was fun: | | http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm | escot wrote: | I highly recommend reading this. VisiCalc is the original | spreadsheet and Bricklin details the whole story of its | invention. So many gems about how he got around constraints, and | added others to make the user experience simple. And spreadsheets | still basically behave the same today! | vic-traill wrote: | I have a copy of VisiCalc on a 51/4" floppy that I can boot on a | IBM 5155 'luggable'. | | It is surprisingly 1-2-3 like. You can see that Lotus directly | ripped off Dan conceptually. I don't have enough background to | know if Lotus 1-2-3 implemented significant improvements over | VisiCalc; I do think that Dan Bricklin was a visionary to see | that a 'what-if?' analysis on a blackboard would be an incredible | exercise in what came to be called a spreadsheet. | | [The luggable boots a version of DOS that doesn't support sub- | directories, so it is pre-2.0.] | ghaff wrote: | It was definitely a revolutionary concept. Subsequent lawsuits, | e.g. with Quattro and 1-2-3, determined it wasn't IP- | protectable for the most part. But VisiCalc absolutely laid out | a fundamentally incredibly important application model for | which the creators never made a lot of money. (And | fundamentally different variants of VisiCalc never went much of | anywhere.) | | The same could be said of the web but this is even truer. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-08 23:01 UTC)