Via Karl Voit I found this video of Dan Bricklin telling the story of how VisiCalc came to be. Many younger Irreal readers probably don’t remember Lotus 1-2-3 let alone VisiCalc so it’s worth mentioning that VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet.
It’s a typical hacker story of writing some code to scratch an itch. Bricklin was getting his MBA at Harvard where the curriculum was based on case studies and involved, among other things, making manual spreadsheet calculations. Bricklin found that it was easy to make a calculation error and of course that error would propagate to other rows and columns. Since grading was based in large part on class participation, it was important to have the calculations correct in order to contribute in an intelligent way.
Bricklin had an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from MIT so automating the calculations on a computer seemed a natural solution. Along with his classmate Bob Frankston, Bricklin starting working on VisiCalc. This was in 1979 when the only reasonable small computer available was the Apple II. Although it ran on the Apple II, VisiCalc was developed on a Multics system that Bricklin and Frankston had access to.
An interesting part of Bricklin’s talk is how he struggled to find the right interface for the program. These days the grid paradigm with numbered rows and lettered columns is so well established that it’s hard to imagine any other way of doing it but Bricklin tried several schemes before settling on the now familiar pattern.
It’s an enjoyable talk and well worth the 12 minutes it takes to watch it. Steve Jobs said that VisiCalc was largely responsible for the early success of Apple so it’s more important than you might think.