Implementing VisiCalc 305
David Leppik writes "The author of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, has
an article about how it was designed. VisiCalc is why businesses started to take the Apple ][ (and personal computers in general) seriously. It also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era. Oh, and you can still
download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare."
Oh So He is to blame... (Score:4, Funny)
Before that all real-estate transactions needed to make sense on the back of an envelope.
How many of you have run into dumb decisions by management that looked good in the spreadsheet?
Re:Oh So He is to blame... (Score:3, Insightful)
The real estate boom also was juiced by an incredible inflation of the late 70's that pushed people into hard assets and away from financial assets. Gold and silver and real estate benefitted from the inflationary environment.
In addition, the Roth tax cuts in the early eighties cut depreciation periods
Re:Oh So He is to blame... (Score:4, Informative)
These investors forgot a very important rule of investing, "what congress giveth congress can taketh away." Congress retroactivly began taxing against Passive income generators, or these partnerships, which destroyed the whole reason for building them in the first place. Combined with the end of the energy crunch led to a tremendous downturn in real estate that lasted almost a decade in oil rich cities. Remember that next time someone starts selling you an investment based only on its tax advantages.
Re:Oh So He is to blame... (Score:3, Insightful)
I was in NYC at the time, temping my way through college in a variety of office jobs. The first wave of spreadsheet-aware MBAs came out and thought everything could be charted on a spreadsheet.
What I noticed was that all kinds of wacky log forms started proliferating in the workplace. Workers were supposed to use these forms to log just about everything they did, even if it didn't make sense.
Me: "But I don't
Re:Oh So He is to blame... (Score:2, Insightful)
Managers who don't know any better demand "best-guess" estimates, then use those inherently false estimates to create hard deadlines and make promises to higher-ups. Then they wonder why everything goes to shit.
Re:Oh So He is to blame... (Score:5, Insightful)
Promise a late delivery date, and verily, the manager shall not bug you whilst you are trying to work. Thus you deliver far sooner than if you give an accurate delivery date.
By following this strategy you will become known as a self-motivated, self-starter who consistently delivers ahead of schedule.
Additionally, your manager will never find himself with his nuts in the fire because of you, and will thus give you more 'manager support' when you need it. (read: performance review).
Good luck! I'm pulling for you. We're all in this together.
Re:Oh So He is to blame... (Score:3, Informative)
Au contraire. A realtor will frequently use an amortization schedule to show a prospective buyer whether a property can cash-flow positively. Banks do them, too, but so do realtors, investors, homebuyers, etc. Partly because of Visicalc. Before Visicalc, more people used tables, but amortization tables have always been a part of the real estate sales pitch, especially for properties that matter, such as multi-family and commercial.
GF.
some things never change (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:some things never change (Score:2)
Crap, just look at education. You see the same long disproven theories wrapped into a fad return year after year.
And don't get me started on economics...
Re:some things never change (Score:2, Insightful)
Software copy protection schemes can be though of like so: they are a tradeoff between convenience and protection. The more you protect, the less convenient it is. Essentially, when you pick a software protections scheme at a given moment in time, assuming you didn't pick an out-of-date one, you are planting your flag on what RATE of piracy you want to allow given the alternative about pissing off your customers.
however (and this is the big however), as time goes on,
Re:some things never change (Score:2, Insightful)
I assert that if Windows XP piracy is down, it is due to the general acceptance that Windows 2000 has become a mature and reliable operating system that meets most needs, thus dissuading people from switching to Windows XP.
Some evidence would make your point far more effectively tha
Re:some things never change (Score:2)
I assert that if Windows XP piracy is down, it is due to the general acceptance that Windows 2000 has become a mature and reliable operating system that meets most needs, thus dissuading people from switching to Windows XP.
Some evidence would make your point far more effectively than t
Re:some things never change (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that the CD Key system completely eliminates piracy, but it's just generally accepted that you have to buy the game now.
Not that I read .nfo files [izonews.com] mind you...
Re:some things never change (Score:2, Informative)
Thus, XP Corporate editions are as easily pirated as ever-- each with a different key indistinguishable from a Microsoft key.
So your 'undisputable' truth has been disputed. However, the frontiers you mention are still entirely possible, but very dependant on both the will of th
Agree or Disagree (Score:4, Informative)
First off, dongle, cd check, product key, all these things are trivial to circumvent. There is no technological frontier of copy protection. There is a binary with a loop that checks for a valid device. This binary loop stands out like a sore thumb in a hex editor. It is easy to take one JMP and redirect it past the loop. If you don't belive it is easy, just look at some of the Cracker FAQs. I'm not saying it is as easy as falling out of bed, but it definately is easier than designing a copy protection scheme in the first place.
Second, copy protection is like snake-oil of the gaming industry. You have companies with names like SafeDisk and WriteBlock. You have people writing huge databases for online product activation. Think about how much it costs MS just to run their call center to process activation. Think about how much Activision paid in royalties to SafeDisk. And for what? Just so I can spend all of 30 seconds at GameCopyWorld do download a no-cd crack.
About 3 nights ago, I was hanging at a friend's house for some gaming. His copy of WinXP crapped out on him. It took 20 minutes on a long-distance call from Tokyo to Washington to get his crap working agian. Oddly enough, my "leaked" serial code has worked perfectly since the day I downloaded it.
Re:some things never change (Score:2)
Although, the lesson is apparently never learned, as they're still trying, aren't they?
It's nice to see that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Indeed.
Weird Al props... (Score:4, Funny)
Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
Got em all printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight.
Re:Weird Al props... (Score:2)
I call him money for short
I call him up at home
and make him do my tech support...
Re:Weird Al props... (Score:2)
um... (Score:4, Insightful)
I highly doubt that this one application started an era of "greed is good." People have always been greedy, this just let them be greedying is a slighly more sucessful manner.
Re:um... (Score:2)
Re:um... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:um... (Score:2)
I don't know if I agree with his thesis 100% but he's certainly not saying that greed didn't exist before Visicalc.
"Greed is good" came from ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I highly doubt that this one application started an era of "greed is good." People have always been greedy, this just let them be greedying is a slighly more sucessful manner.
"Greed is good", IMNSHO, came from Ayn Rand, via the Objectivist society, the Society(?) for Individiual Liberties (SIL), the Libertarian Party (and non-party-member libertarians).
Rand's thesis is a re
Rock On! (Score:5, Funny)
What's that?
It's WHAT century?
Shit. Oh well. No Cholera for me. . .
SHAZAM. (Score:3, Informative)
Oregon Trail [the-underdogs.org]
Am I not merciful??? :)
Re:Rock On! (Score:4, Funny)
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego [the-underdogs.org] (along with the rest of the series [the-underdogs.org]).
Need anything else?
Re:Rock On! (Score:2)
You got your octothorpe stroke?
Apple II - serious? (Score:2, Interesting)
Mind you, I was too busy designing newspapers in Grade 3 on Apple IIe's to consider using VisiCalc on it. And damn AppleWorks was a bad wordprocessor. I guess Word isn't so bad after all, at least I don't have to change floppies to do a spell check.
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:3, Informative)
Depends. Lots of small businesses bought them. My folks did, and they ran some custom accounting apps for years on an Apple ][ (which predated PCs by quite a bit), later an Apple ][e, and stil later on a GS.
Just like today, run whatever scratches your itch.
GF.
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:5, Interesting)
I spent several long days typing the ledger sheets into VisiCalc sheets, which would then print out in a similar format, but with the balance figured by computer, not by hand.
Granted, if you look at this with 2003's perspective, it looks like banging the rocks together to make ones and zeros. But at the time, it would have cost a pile of money to get someone with a snazzy mainframe to do, and here's some kid knocking it off in the basement. The accountant was floored.
And I got paid for playing on a computer. My lord, how little has changed.
--
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the first IBM PC? Pretty much everywhere. Up till that point, most business microcomputers ran CP/M. VisiCalc was the original "killer app", and it put Apple on the map. Within a year of VisiCalc's release, Apple IIs had gone from just-another-home-computer (toy) to being the best-selling business microcomputers around.
Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a couple of years later completely overshadowed Apple's moment in the sun.
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:2)
People always forget that Apple did make an "Apple III" that was targeted at buisness. Unfortunately the machine was an unmitigated failure. It wasn't fully backwards compatible with the Apple II's, and it had lots of hardware problems to boot.
More Apple III info... [acornworld.net]
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:2)
The IBM PC played its part in Apple's fall from grace, but don't underestimate Apple's miserable attempt at a business-centric machine, the Apple III [landsnail.com] -- it likely put the final nail in the coffin as far as Apple's role in the business computer market.
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:2)
I strongly disagree. The Apple II family continued to be Apple's best-sellers (in both the home and business markets) for years after the III was retired and abandoned. In fact, the Apple II continued selling well into the early Mac days, and Apple pretty much had to put a stake through its heart to put it to rest. So I'd say -- as someone who was there -- that the negative effects of the Apple
Yeah for real... (Score:2)
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:2)
A lot. Common programs were: Peachtree Accounting, dBase II, WordStar, Print Shop, Sensible Speller, etc.
Take a look here [apple2history.org] for others.
> And damn AppleWorks was a bad wordprocessor.
But it was one of the first integrated office apps.
--
This is NOT a
Millions on Apple II (Score:3, Interesting)
My co-worker's (are you there Joe?) roommate worked at A
From 1977 - 1982, a lot (Score:2)
Gobs of businesses used Apple II's in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't until the IBM PC (first shipped in 1982) became popular that businesses started to go that route.
Apple didn't do much to keep the business people... they quit focusing on the Apple II and instead built the Apple III (so overengineered that it didn't work --- there were actually chips on the board that disabled certain features -- read up on it at www.woz.org for th
Re:Apple II - serious? (Score:2)
Given plenty of storage and memory, AppleWorks (especially >=3.0) was a pretty decent package. 128K and a pair of 5.25" floppies was definitely suboptimal (stick with pre-3.0 versions for such a system), but with 1 meg of RAM and a hard drive (or at least 256K and a 3.5" floppy drive), it was pretty decent. The TimeOut addons were cool, as well (especially SuperFonts and UltraMacros). Just because your school didn't shell out for the goodies didn't make
AppleWorks as a WP (Score:2)
Fonts weren't much on a issue for me, as I rarely used AppleWorks to print my final draft -- I'd usually save the file as plain ASCII and open it up in Publish-It (a nice Apple II DTP app) for final fonts, layout, and clip art.
Before I got a Mac, I upgraded to an Apple IIgs with an Apple StyleWriter 360 dpi ink
Dan Bricklin Co-Creator's Side of the Story (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike many software programs after it, the basic concepts of Visicalc were never patented.
You can read about why Visicalc [bricklin.com] wasn't patented here.
Very Old but Powerful for its time (Score:4, Interesting)
Very Old but Powerful for its time.. & still a (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually wish a lot of schools would just buy older Apple II's and then use eBay as a sou
Re:Very Old but Powerful for its time.. & stil (Score:2)
That's not the point. PC's are in nearly every home now, Apple II's are not. It's hard to get by these days without knowing at least a little bit about how to use a PC.
Old computers are still very useful (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you're right about that, but it misses the point. The educational value of a computer does not, for the most part, lie in learning how to use the computer for its own sake. A computer is a general purpose information tool and one goal in owning a computer is education. Education can include reading, writing, math, science, social studies, etc. A computer can, to an extent, help with all of those subjects.
Note that an Apple ][ will help you just as much with your math as a PC, as long as the software on each is roughly equivalent.
I do get tired of hearing about school districts that just dropped $250,000 for a brand new computer lab, and then they turn around and lay off teachers then complain about the student:teacher ratio. It doesn't make sense to do that when you consider that they really don't even need the lab.
The above probably set you to thinking about how inadequate an Apple would be to learn computer science subjects. You would be right to an extent, but a lab really sees far more uses than just for computer science education. If the goal is to best serve the majority of the student body, then buying your computer equipment (and by extension the education software) around the needs of your computer science oriented students is a poor choice.
Re:Old computers are still very useful (Score:3, Informative)
That new fieldhouse, and those computers, come either
Re:Very Old but Powerful for its time (Score:2)
FWIW, I'd rather see the money sunk into new books than new computers.
GF.
Re:Very Old but Powerful for its time (Score:2)
I agree completely. Whenever the local paper runs a story about how some school just spent a quarter million dollars to buy some computers which will be used as a bunch of glorified typewriters, I wonder why they don't use the money to replace some of the thirty-year-old textbooks that are still in use.
its not amazing, its reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Our children are the future and our most valued possession.. yet we treat their education like a 'irritant ' and wont get involved or support it..
Plus don't forget, fundamentals don't change... and fundamentals are important, regardless of what some people/educators believe these days.
Pretty common, actually (Score:2)
There are also gobs of eductional titles available for the Apple II. Unlike most modern software, many of the old titles shipped with entire binders full of manual, usage, and educational tie-in materials. Some of the MECC titles ev
Leave this running (Score:4, Funny)
Do you have any idea how much ... (Score:2, Redundant)
Visicalc (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a mixed bag, admittedly. On the plus side, Visicalc indirectly led me to doing a pile of neat-o things. On the minus side, I've probably gotten laid less.
GF.
Re:Visicalc (Score:2)
Oh, you meant GAMES...
Re:Visicalc (Score:2)
Re:Visicalc (Score:2)
You're American, right? Sue the bastard ;-)
Easter Egg? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Easter Egg? (Score:2, Interesting)
the greed is good era? (Score:2, Informative)
Assuming by the 'greed is good' era, you are referring to the Gordon Gecko speech in the movie 'Wall Street', you are talking about the 80s LBO boom, you're pretty far off base. That boom was enabled by a lot of things, but the biggest factor was the rise of the ability to evaluate a company's value by free cash flow rather than earnings, and the ability to nearly instantaneously gain access to huge amounts of debt (brought abou
Wait just a gol-dang minute. . . (Score:4, Funny)
yes I've 28k HD space but RAM requirements? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yes I've 28k HD space but RAM requirements? (Score:3, Funny)
Visicalc begat Lotus 1-2-3 begat Excel (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Visicalc begat Lotus 1-2-3 begat Excel (Score:4, Informative)
And Excel wasn't Microsoft's first spreadsheet. First there was Multiplan. There was even a Commodore 64 version of Multiplan. Jeez, was it slow.
Re:Visicalc begat Lotus 1-2-3 begat Excel (Score:2)
Re:Visicalc begat Lotus 1-2-3 begat Excel (Score:2)
I remember something very similar. A teacher was showing off some shiny new Macintoshes and some painting and word processing software (probably Mac Write and Mac Paint, maybe Aldus PageMaker). The printer was a first generation Apple Laserwriter networked to about 4 macs via AppleTalk/LocalTalk. At the time it seemed like black magic!
I do remember MS Excel, but I don't recall using MS Word or MS Works on
Accountant, ``I want a VisiCalc'' (Score:5, Interesting)
William
VisiCalc Trivia (Score:5, Funny)
On my Apple //c (Score:4, Interesting)
VisiCalc came in a green and white small binder, if I remember correctly. It help me learn some of the basics of spreadsheet software. I imagine I still have the binder and disk(s?) around somewhere.
From the license agreement:
1) use the Program for your personal use, not commercially,
So much for basing my business on VisiCalc these days...
I also recently downloaded a DOS game, TankWars (before Scorched Earth, for anyone that played that) and have been playing it frequently on my office computer.
VisiCalc (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah, let me just go ahead and break out my extra 50 gig hard drive I just happen to have sittin... did you say bytes?
the philosophy (Score:2, Interesting)
Can VisiCalc replace Excel at NASA? (Score:2, Interesting)
code whore (Score:4, Funny)
>A7:"Never making a dime
>B5:11000
>A5:"Two Apple ]['s
>B4:2000
>A4:"Junk-food for programmers
>B3:50000
>A3:"Two Programers
>A1:"Visi Calc:
20 years later, and its still more then many need. (Score:3, Insightful)
VisiCalc ( and many other older applications )still does more then many people would ever need.
And it's really, really fast!! (Score:2)
Old, but stil used. (Score:5, Interesting)
He has spreadsheets that he originally wrote on the Apple II+ in 1980, and has continually updated to the point of such huge complexity it would take weeks to remake them in a more modern OS / Application.
Even when he finally broke down and bought a Mac in 1994, he bought a
What's funny is that he knows he is really screwed if that disk fails - you can't copy it because of the 8-sector format, and the manual says "if the disk ever goes bad, just mail us at $address and we'll send you a new one"
I can't believe that disk hasn't become completely degaussed after the 23+ years it has been in use
My folks still use 'em for labels (Score:2)
Linux port ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously though, 27k is a nice size for an
app that did so much. If only openoffice could
lean down their suite a bit so it loads in less than
45seconds on my AMD K7-650. (Not trying to troll)
I recall tuning my DOS system to have Lotus 123
load in less than a second. Good days
The path of history (Score:5, Interesting)
Charles Simonyi, onetime competitor to VisiCalc, was the moderator, but he made a remarkable claim about its role in history.
What he starts with is true. Visicalc was the first app that caused people to buy personal computers in numbers, and in particular for business people to do so. In the past, people wanted an Apple ][ or a Pet. This changed, so that they wanted VisiCalc, and an Apple was the way to get something to run it on.
As such, VisiCalc sparked the PC industry, which begat, well, all of this. Quite a juncture in history.
Of course, something else would have come along, PCs are just too useful for this not to happen, but the course of it was definitely set and changed by Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra -- and Mitch Kapor, who was product manager for VisiCalc before he went to found Lotus and eventually defeat VisiCalc in the market.
The meseum at computerhistory.org will probably put up the video of the panel before too long, so you can check it out.
We forget how amazing this was... (Score:3, Interesting)
Skidding (Score:3, Interesting)
I find this interesting because NeXTstep had a terrible problem with typeahead when it came to scrolling in almost any application. It's a good thing those guys fixed it for OS X. At least it seems to have been fixed for OS X.
I wan't my Number Munchers back! (Score:3, Funny)
][ in middle east!
Headline should be "How to write a program" (Score:5, Insightful)
With concepts like
"VisiCalc was a product, not a program"
"The goal was to give the user a conceptual model which was unsurprising -- it was called the principle of least surprise. We were illusionists synthesizing an experience."
"One guiding principle was to always have functioning code. It was the scaffolding and all I needed to do was flesh it out. Or not. Since the program held together omitting a feature was a choice and it gave us flexibility"
and from the section on 'kidding'
"I doubt if any but the most geeky users were even aware that there was an issue let alone a solution. This is the kind of design detail that makes a program feel good even if you don't know why."
I've tried to tell several younger coders things like this on many occassions, and getting the message through can be hard work !
This article shows not only why these principles are important, but how to approach projects overall. Someone should carve it in stone (then hit newbie programmers over the head with it until it sinks in
Accountants Turned Programmers (Score:4, Interesting)
Accountants became de-facto programmers and did some pretty nifty things with macros. With this came the downsides of amature programmers also, such as hard-to-figure-out coding and other maintenance headaches.
The accountant-as-programmer trend more or less ended when Excel replaced Lotus-123 as the "in" spreadsheet package, and keyboard macros gave way to Excel Basic (I don't remember the exact MS name). Excel Basic sucked as a language. Besides, macros did not require learning anything really new because they were pretty much the very menu sequence that users typed anyhow. But Excel Basic was a completely different language that had almost no direct relationship to the user menus. Mousing instead of typing also diminished letter-centric thinking.
Astute macro users were pissed at being forced to MS, but generally appear to have eventually just given up or scaled way back on spreadsheet programming. I believe Excel had a "macro recorder" of its own, but one could not add IF statements and loops nearly as easily as 123 without getting into VB-like programming syntax.
An interesting era of end-user programming came and went.
Eureka! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:at this point why bother with a license? (Score:2)
Now if someone where to go off and figure out how to play doom with it, or render it as a Magic-Eye puzzle, that would be novel.
All of the complexity in that design was getting it to fit into 64Kb of memory. A single link of TCL code would probably use more than that.
Re:at this point why bother with a license? (Score:4, Informative)
Since it was probably written in pure assembly language (most microcomputer apps were at the time), it's unlikely to be of much use to modern development teams. And in any case, there are already a plethora of clones available; the oldest free one I know of is sc, which runs on dos and text-based unix systems. Originally by James Gosling of gosmacs and java fame. If you really want a tiny, underpowered spreadsheet, that's where I'd start. Otherwise, why not just stick with KSpread or Gnumeric or something similar.
(I feel like I should mention oreo too, the emacs to sc's vi, but I couldn't quite work it in.)
Re:Who needs visicalc... (Score:3, Insightful)
you can't beowulf outside of Linux (Score:2)
There was no way to start or stop the tape drive. We had to leave gaps in the data on the tape to allow for processing of each chunk of data before we got the next one.
Just so everyone knows, this required 90 minutes of cassette tape for one kilobyte of data. The had a fancy "saving" movie that used up all the processing power, or was that a certain other product?
Re:you can't beowulf outside of Linux (Score:5, Funny)
good christ! what, did it record the voice of someone saying "one...zero....zero....one...one...one..." or what?
Re:you can't beowulf outside of Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Nope. The Apple's cassette port used Manchester-encoded data at 1200 bps (the same speed as the Commodore 64's floppy drive).
A couple of friends and I used audio amplifier chips to simulate rudimentary 1200-bps half-duplex modems with the Apple cassette ports. Like everything else on that machine, there really weren't many limits to the I/O hacking possibilities.
Cassette data formats (Score:2)
Things like that have been done since then - Information Society has a song on one of their CDs called "300 8N1" - play it to your modem, and it'll output ascii...
Re:I'm glad I was too young to use that (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I'm glad I was too young to use that (Score:3, Funny)
They both run at the same speed!
Re:I'm glad I was too young to use that (Score:4, Insightful)
Or if you're not, you're totally off base. Those were the days when programming was really fun, man! I remember being really excited when the PalmPilot came out, cuz it sounded like a good opportunity to get back to programming the way folks were meant to do it.
Who's with me??
Re:I'm glad I was too young to use that (Score:3, Interesting)
ME!
I've been having fun doing that very thing.
Of course, my phone (Kyocera 6035) has four times more pixels than my first computer, 2048 times more memory than my first computer, and a CPU that's 11 times faster than my first computer.
But even now, Palm programming's more like programming for a Mac in 1985.
Re:Just when was the ""greed is good" era? (Score:2)
fyi on "greed is good" (Score:2)
Re:Mac OS X? (Score:3, Funny)