J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

29 Years Of Spreadsheets

Next year marks the 30th anniversary of the electronic spreadsheet. The 29th anniversary came and went last week, and I forgot all about it.

Peter Jennings writes about VisicCalc 1979:

The first copy of VisiCalc for the Apple ][ (Version 1.37) went out the door on October 17, 1979. By the end of the month, we had shipped 1293 copies. As the sales figures grew, VisiCalc became a household word. It even appears in the Oxford English Dictionary...

VisiCalc was the software which brought the power of the personal computer to the common man. Before its introduction, computers, even personal computers, could only be programmed by people who had made the effort to learn a programming language. Users without programming skills were locked into using the existing applications. What they could not do was to solve problems. VisiCalc unlocked the power of the computer as a problem solving device to those who did not wish to learn programming skills and in such a way that it did not seem like programming at all. Even today, most users of spreadsheet applications do not think of themselves as programmers. But that is exactly what they are doing every time they type a formula.

At Dan Bricklin's site, The Idea:

The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to me while I was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on my MBA degree, in the spring of 1978. Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream. "Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse..." (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto). And "..imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer '10% will be fine!'" (10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't do very complicated calculations...)

The summer of 1978, between first and second year of the MBA program, while riding a bike along a path on Martha's Vineyard, I decided that I wanted to pursue this idea and create a real product to sell after I graduated.

If you're too young to have actually used VisiCalc on the job, you can download a copy and take it for a spin: VisiCalc Executable for the IBM PC. The complete app is 27K. Installation is not necessary.

You can find some basic instructions here: VisiCalc Instructions. You'll need them; the user interface is rather cryptic. If you prefer to just dig around, here's a tip: Press the Slash key for the menu.

I still have a copy of VisiCalc, and I dug it out of the garage and took a photo of the manual and diskette. It has a copyright date of 1981. But, of course, I no longer have a 5.25" floppy drive.

Fortunately, the Web has lots of good information about VisiCalc, so this old program isn't going to be forgotten any time soon.

Does anyone have any old *.VC files they can send me?

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