[HN Gopher] The History of VisiCalc
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-08 23:01 UTC)