What was first spreadsheet program

I came out of the word processing and typesetting worlds, where every keystroke counted. I was competing against the back of the envelope.

If it took longer to input something on a spreadsheet, you would have done it by hand instead. So I tried to make it as simple as minimal as possible. It was really important to make it easy to use. Lots of people were building software for financial forecasting using rows, columns, formulas, and all, but not put together the way the spreadsheet was, aimed for ease of use with a general-purpose, two-dimensional, word-processing-like layout.

General-purpose tools have their advantages. They become widely used because you can use them for a wide range of tasks. You only have to learn the one tool. Early on, consultants told us they used it to help lay out slot machines on a casino floor. And doctors did calculations, too. But I was really goofing off because it only took an hour and then I took the the rest of the day off.

People thought I was a wunderkind but I was using this tool. Yes, they had these magic powers, and were able to move up in their organizations because of them.

That made them innovators—it may be correct that they got those promotions. It also speaks to the flexibility and power of a seemingly simple tool. There are many tools that seem simple—think of a pencil and paper—that are very complicated to build.

A pencil is not a trivial thing to make. That was a lot of money in those days. You could buy a pretty good car for that amount. The personal computer gave you times or more power than doing it by hand. It validated the personal computer for business. In that sense, the history of the spreadsheet is in some ways the history of Apple. For various historical reasons, Apple lucked out and had VisiCalc to themselves for a year. It was the only place to get it for a while.

Mattessich, Pardoe and Landau's work and that of other developers of spreadsheets on mainframe computers probably had no influence on Bricklin and Frankston. Therefore, a history of the modern era of microcomputer-based electronic spreadsheets should begin with the "Tale of VisiCalc". The tale of VisiCalc is part myth and part fact for most of us. The story is that Dan Bricklin was preparing a spread sheet analysis for a Harvard Business School "case study" report and had two alternatives: 1 do it by hand or 2 use a clumsy time-sharing mainframe program.

Bricklin thought there must be a better way. He wanted a program where people could visualize the spreadsheet as they created it. His metaphor was "an electronic blackboard and electronic chalk in a classroom. By the fall of , Bricklin had programmed the first working prototype of his concept in integer basic. The program helped users input and manipulate a matrix of five columns and 20 rows.

The first version was not very "powerful" so Bricklin recruited an MIT acquaintance Bob Frankston to improve and expand the program. Bricklin calls Frankston the "co-creator" of the electronic spreadsheet. Frankston created the production code with faster speed, better arithmetic, and scrolling. He also expanded the program and "packed the code into a mere 20k of machine memory, making it both powerful and practical enough to be run on a microcomputer".

For more details check Dan Bricklin's email from May 12, Fylstra was "marketing-oriented" and suggested that the product would be viable if it could run on an Apple micro-computer.

VisiCalc became an almost instant success and provided many business people with an incentive to purchase a personal computer or an H-P 85 or 87 calculator from Hewlett-Packard cf. About 1 million copies of the spreadsheet program were sold during VisiCalc's product lifetime. Bricklin includes early ads and reviews and pictures of the VisiCalc packaging and screenshots. The market for electronic spreadsheet software was growing rapidly in the early s and VisiCalc stakeholders were slow to respond to the introduction of the IBM PC that used an Intel computer chip.

During this period, Mitch Kapor developed Lotus and his spreadsheet program quickly became the new industry spreadsheet standard. Lotus made it easier to use spreadsheets and it added integrated charting, plotting and database capabilities. Lotus established spreadsheet software as a major data presentation package as well as a complex calculation tool. Lotus was also the first spreadsheet vendor to introduce naming cells, cell ranges and spreadsheet macros. But the spreadsheet has been organizing various aspects of our lives for hundreds of years.

In fact, the boom in computer usage over the years may not have been so prominent without online spreadsheets. The term spreadsheet might seem strange to those who associate it with only its digital capability.

However, the spreadsheet is quite a literal reference to its original form hundreds of years ago. Back then, a spreadsheet was a ledger book full of huge sheets of paper that would quite literally spread across the table. Rows and columns divided these sheets for manually entering data using a pen or pencil.

Accountants would primarily use these ledger books for a variety of finance-related scenarios that handled a lot of data. A whole spreadsheet could cover aspects such as accounts receivable, investments, inventory and expenses.

Everything accountants needed to know was right there in one place, so they could easily make important decisions. After the rise of the digital revolution, its digital counterpart replaced the physical spreadsheet.

Even though LANPAR could replace paper-based spreadsheets entirely, the computers were simply too costly, bulky, and scarce to the public. VisCalc was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers. Some screenshots may help show how much has survived. The screen has a command area at the top where the cursor location was displayed, as well as the formatting setting for the cell and its formula.

The main area has rows and columns labeled A, B, C across the top and 1, 2, 3 down the side. The cursor highlights a cell which displays the calculated results.

The entire sheet was stored in a single file. To change a cell, you move the cursor to it with the arrow keys the original design used a mouse, but the PCs of that day did not have a mouse and then type the new value.

The first character of what you type determines how the contents are interpreted. Here is a screenshot of Microsoft Excel 97, shipped about 18 years after the first VisiCalc:. There is a command area at the top, with similar commands. The format of the current cell is displayed, as is the location and the contents. The main area is labeled the same and works very similarly. To change a cell, you move the cursor to it with the arrow keys and then type a new value.

Much of the reason for this similarity comes from the strength of the design but also from the fact that Excel the dominant spreadsheet of the late 's needed to follow the conventions of , the spreadsheet that was most important during the major adoption years of PCs.

The relationship between and VisiCalc is a whole other topic which I won't get into in this piece. They didn't mindlessly follow them all, of course. To rename a file, you type a new command, such as "rename oldname. Here is the common way today to find files:. You can scroll through a hierarchy, sort by clicking on column headings, rename a file by pointing to it and typing, etc. Quite a change. Hopefully this long discourse is helpful in putting VisiCalc in perspective.

Home Writings. Why am I writing this? For example, the combination of: Labels and formulas distinguished by first character typed Minimal-keystroke formula entry: type "1.