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Programming Businesses Apple IT Technology

Implementing VisiCalc 305

Posted by timothy from the gnumeric's-great-grand-daddy dept.
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."
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Implementing VisiCalc More

Implementing VisiCalc

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  • Oh So He is to blame... (Score:4, Funny)

    by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 ) <{yoda} {at} {etoyoc.com}> on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:13PM (#5696314) Homepage Journal
    I remember a realator telling me that the real-estate market didn't go loony until the creation of the spreadsheet.

    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?

    • I remember a realator telling me that the real-estate market didn't go loony until the creation of the spreadsheet. Before that all real-estate transactions needed to make sense on the back of an envelope.

      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)

        by nelsonal ( 549144 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:26PM (#5696952) Journal
        It was mostly partnerships that let you deduct losses against your income. Imagine a group of doctors that started a partnership to build their office building, they build it, pay rent to the partnership, claim a tax loss due to deprication and interest, and deduct the rent and loss from their business income, while recieving a cash payment from the partnership at the end of the year. This and other partnerships were what drove the real estate boom of the early eighties. Other investors built office buildings for the tax loss, without expecting any rentors.
        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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How many of you have run into dumb decisions by management that looked good in the spreadsheet?

      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
      • They were foolishly measuring the wrong things. You can track the progress of a project but you cannot absolutely quantify it.

        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)

          by Fjornir ( 516960 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @12:39AM (#5698995)
          You must learn, grasshopper, that you must _always_ underpromise, and overperform.

          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.

  • some things never change (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mosch ( 204 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:13PM (#5696318) Homepage
    Eventually the copy protection become too much of an impediment and we dropped it.
    It's nice to see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The lesson that complicated copy protection schemes don't work was apparently first learned in 1978.
    • You have to wonder how boring the world would be if we actually LEARNED from our mistakes.

      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...

    • Sigh. What oversimplified crap.

      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,

      • You claim that the Windows XP piracy is down because of an intrusive activation scheme, but you have no evidence of that. Even if Windows XP piracy rates are down (which you failed to demonstrate), you didn't show causality.

        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

        • You claim that the Windows XP piracy is down because of an intrusive activation scheme, but you have no evidence of that. Even if Windows XP piracy rates are down (which you failed to demonstrate), you didn't show causality.

          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)

        by Schnapple ( 262314 ) <tomkiddNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:02PM (#5696793) Homepage
        contributing technologies, such as the internet...software vendor can increasingly gain protection without increasing inconvenience, and so forth
        Kinda reminds me of the CD Key system being used in online games nowadays. It's so effective that when you see the .nfo files for these games you see things like "no internet multiplayer - buy the game if you want to play online".

        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...

      • Has it now? I'm betting that the decrease in XP piracy is maybe 3% or less. Microsoft left a huge backdoor in the works with the name Corporate on it, and no matter how good your key encryption is, someone'll find a way to break it.

        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)

        by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 ) <xptical@gmEEEail.com minus threevowels> on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:50PM (#5697108)
        I have reread your comment several times, and I'm not sure if I should disagree, or agree.

        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.

    • The lesson that complicated copy protection schemes don't work was apparently first learned in 1978.

      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)

    by H0NGK0NGPH00EY ( 210370 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:14PM (#5696324) Homepage
    Uh, uh, loggin' in now
    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.
    • ...I'm down with bill gates
      I call him money for short
      I call him up at home
      and make him do my tech support...
    • You ever notice how Windows 95 commercials used the lines, "You can start me up, I'll never stop, never stop, never stop, never stop," but stopped just short of "You make a grown man cry?" I always wondered why they would have left themselves open like that. :-)

  • um... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alwsn ( 593349 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:14PM (#5696326)
    It also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era.

    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.
    • It was the secret behind many of the "Masters of the Universe" during the 80s. I know Milken started making his fortune by being one of the first to use calculators and later computers in his bond trading. It's a little amazing how primative the financial markets were in the late 70s and early 80s.

    • Re:um... (Score:2, Funny)

      by ralico ( 446325 )
      So VisiCalc added speed to greed, eh?
    • He's saying that 80's finance (mergers & acquisitions, mortgage bond trading, junk bonds) was facilitated by spreadsheets, and using a line from an 80's movie as shorthand for it.

      I don't know if I agree with his thesis 100% but he's certainly not saying that greed didn't exist before Visicalc.

    • [Visicalc] also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era.

      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)

    by Limburgher ( 523006 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:15PM (#5696334) Homepage Journal
    Now all I need is Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and I'll be all set.

    What's that?

    It's WHAT century?

    Shit. Oh well. No Cholera for me. . .

  • Apple II - serious? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by saskboy ( 600063 )
    Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?

    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.
    • Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?

      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)

      by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:47PM (#5696666) Homepage
      My father's business was facing a possible audit. All the books were kept on ledger sheets (one page of paper per customer) and his accountant was horrified.
      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)

      by Xtifr ( 1323 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:47PM (#5696669) Homepage
      Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?

      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.

      • 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]

      • Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a couple of years later completely overshadowed Apple's moment in the sun.

        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.
        • [the Apple III] likely put the final nail in the coffin as far as Apple's role in the business computer market.

          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
    • I remember I had a Commodore 64 back in the day, and my envious friend had an Apple II. His dad's reasoning was that the Apple II was better for business, which was true, but then his dad never ever used it.
    • > Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?

      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 .sig! :)

    • Millions on Apple II (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In 1979, our utility bought all our power from other suppliers and inflation was causing rates to go up incessantly. If we didn't raise our rates we would have been out of business in months. I worked in the rate dept where we would make our calculations on desk calculators and give them to the secretarys to type on the word processor (Wang?). When an error was made or new information came in - recalculate all the sheets again and then print them all.

      My co-worker's (are you there Joe?) roommate worked at A
    • Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?

      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

    • And damn AppleWorks was a bad wordprocessor.

      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

      • I used AppleWorks 2 and 3 on a machine with a single 5.25" drive (and Apple //c to be exact). It worked quite well, but I did have to swap disks to do a spell check. Bankstreet Writer was also nice.

        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)

    by pgrote ( 68235 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:16PM (#5696345) Homepage
    Dan Bricklin [bricklin.com] has a page or two on the history from his perspective.

    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)

    by zbowling ( 597617 ) <zacNO@SPAMzacbowling.com> on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:16PM (#5696347) Homepage Journal
    Kids at the nearby school, still have a room of apple 2s with this still running on them. They still use it for basic spreadsheet training too. Amazing that some schools are so poor the can't afford new PCs. At least this one picked something powerful for its time.
    • But why do they need new computers to waste taxpayer money when they have GREAT educational tools already. Apple II programs were very diverse and VERY well written. A graphic for flash cards & teaching how to tell time can only be so ornate before it becomes bloated with too much "eye candy" - Reader Rabbit Chotzky is no better than MECC Ciriculum on the Apple II. Plus where else are kids going to learn Turtle?

      I actually wish a lot of schools would just buy older Apple II's and then use eBay as a sou

      • " A graphic for flash cards & teaching how to tell time can only be so ornate before it becomes bloated with too much "eye candy""

        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)

          by Da VinMan ( 7669 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:49PM (#5697104)
          It's hard to get by these days without knowing at least a little bit about how to use a PC.

          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.
          • Well, something you should probably have pointed out to you before you complain about a school buying a new computer lab, new parking lot or new fieldhouse, is that this money doesn't come from the budget that pays for teachers & staff. That money comes from taxes...it's the only way to run a public institution. You have a budget and know exactly how much you're getting, and you divvy that up in expenses that you exactly how must everything costs.

            That new fieldhouse, and those computers, come either
    • A school near me still uses their apples for flashcard-type math and reading drills. They still work, the kids still learn the material. Why upgrade when the things still do what you need them to do? Young kids, especially, just need a tool to do the job. If they need a hammer, give them a hammer. Don't give them a piledriver.

      FWIW, I'd rather see the money sunk into new books than new computers.

      GF.

      • FWIW, I'd rather see the money sunk into new books than new computers.

        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)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:46PM (#5696662) Homepage Journal
      Many schools are dirt poor and happy to have what ever they can get. Some can barely afford PAPER, and the teachers end up buying some out of their own pocket so they can teach.

      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.
    • An Apple II is about all a person needs for basic "computer skills", especially for spreadsheets. Sure, MS Excel can walk my dog and wash my car, but the basics (managing tables & columns, writing formulas) really hasn't changed since VisiCalc or AppleWorks for the Apple II.

      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)

    by sirsampson ( 48252 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:17PM (#5696358)
    Set this running full screen on your machine and scare people away...
  • pr0n and mp3s I'd have to delete to be able to download and run this program? 27,520 bytes ? What, I'm made of money? Who's got those sort of resources?

  • Visicalc (Score:5, Interesting)

    by guacamolefoo ( 577448 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:19PM (#5696386) Homepage Journal
    The reason I first got my hands on an Apple ][ at the ripe age of six was because my father wanted it for forecasting and doing bookkeeping. The seed planted in my brain at that time led to an awful lot more than what he expected from the machine. If it hadn't been for that box, I probably never would have started an ISP later in life, and I probably would not be nearly the techno/gadget geek I have become since.

    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.

  • Easter Egg? (Score:4, Funny)

    by charlieo88 ( 658362 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:19PM (#5696388)
    Okay, I downloaded it. Now how do I get to the flight simulator?

    • Re:Easter Egg? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by OldFart58 ( 663547 )
      You might have to flip the floppy over - this was a classic hiding place for Easter Eggs on the Apple ][. Example: Karateka (one of my favorites!) - flipping the disk over +boot would result in the game playing _upside_down_ - funny, in and of itself, but even more so was acting nonchalant whilst demonstrating this effect to non-computer-geeks (at that time, practically everyone else 8-) and internalizing the mixed emotions evoked when I realized that this effect wasn't (much) questioned as anything but a

  • the greed is good era? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    'which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era'

    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)

    by Limburgher ( 523006 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:20PM (#5696399) Homepage Journal
    This won't open my Excel spreadsheets! Clearly inferior software. . .;)P

  • yes I've 28k HD space but RAM requirements? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rlthomps-1 ( 545290 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:23PM (#5696432) Homepage
    I've only got 640k, I was told that's all I'd ever need.

  • Visicalc begat Lotus 1-2-3 begat Excel (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sans_A_Cause ( 446229 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:24PM (#5696439)
    And thus it was in the beginning. Excel was originally a Mac program. I remember one of my chemistry profs laughing at our "toy" computer and its funny li'l "mouse". Laughing 'til he saw the output, anyway. Off a networked postscript laserprinter. The year was 1985.

    • Re:Visicalc begat Lotus 1-2-3 begat Excel (Score:4, Informative)

      by grondu ( 239962 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:31PM (#5696991)
      Excel was originally a Mac program

      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.
    • Laughing 'til he saw the output, anyway. Off a networked postscript laserprinter. The year was 1985.

      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)

    by WillAdams ( 45638 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:27PM (#5696476) Homepage
    That was an actual statement made at an Apple dealer I was visiting when I was kid, so the salesperson sold him an Apple ][, and pretty much one of everything in the store (the guy also sprang for a 132 column daisy wheel printer....).

    William

  • VisiCalc Trivia (Score:5, Funny)

    by jratcliffe ( 208809 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:28PM (#5696487)
    There's a nice little plaque at Harvard Biz School, in the classroom where Dan Bricklin first developed the VisiCalc idea (Aldrich 108). He came to my Managing Product Development class while I was at HBS, really cool guy. Tells a great story about doing a calculation in a very roundabout way, and then getting asked by the professor in class the next day "right answer, but why didn't you just use a ratio?" Dan said "well, this way will be more accurate." Truth of the matter was, he hadn't gotten the divide function working yet. :)

  • On my Apple //c (Score:4, Interesting)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) <nowalmartNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:30PM (#5696500) Homepage Journal
    I remember running VisiCalc on my Apple //c (128k RAM, integrated 5.25" drive).

    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)

    by TheWickedKingJeremy ( 578077 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:35PM (#5696549) Homepage
    Oh, and you can still download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare.

    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)

    by vivek7006 ( 585218 )
    "VisiCalc was a product, not a program. Decisions were made with the product in mind and, to the extent possible the programming was towards this end" I only wish that all the present day s/w are built like that
  • Maybe this can be NASA's new, low cost orbital debris analysis program [chron.com] instead of Excel. Heck, it might even save a shuttle or two.

  • code whore (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:49PM (#5696689)
    >B7:"Priceless
    >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: /W1 /GOC /GRA /GC9 /X>A1:>B7:

  • 20 years later, and its still more then many need. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @05:50PM (#5696696) Homepage Journal
    Current software in general is so over bloated we don't use but a small percentage of its features..

    VisiCalc ( and many other older applications )still does more then many people would ever need.
    • A number of years ago, my wife had a tax consulting business. At one point she had a 25MHz 386sx laptop, which was annoyingly slow for the then-current tax software. One of her clients needed to access some files from a couple of years before, when she'd been using a spreadsheet on her Toshiba 1000 9.xMHz 8086-clone laptop. Wow! Was that ever Fast!.

  • Old, but stil used. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:04PM (#5696801) Journal
    As old and archaic as the interface is, my old man is still using it.

    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 //e compatibility card for it (Apple made a PDS card that you could plug into a Mac that had a //e on it, and software emulated all of the add-on cards, and you could plug a 5.25in. floppy into the back. It even had a port to plug in a joystick or paddles!) He has continued to use these spreadsheets with his original VisiCalc 1.0 8-sector diskette on that machine, even though he has since bought a PowerMac and an iBook. The good ol 33Mhz '030 based Mac with the //e card still sits proudly in his home office with the ImageWriter pin-banger next to the Epson Stylus Photo.

    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
    • Both my parents and grandparents still use an Apple IIc for printing labels. They each have an Appleworks database with addresses of friends and family. Plugged into the Apple is an ImageWriter II with pin-feed address labels. Their box of 5000 labels is starting to empty... may soon be time to find a new source for the labels or *gasp* upgrade.

  • Linux port ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dr-suess-fan ( 210327 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:06PM (#5696820)
    You mean it's not available on Linux yet ? WTF?

    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)

    by btempleton ( 149110 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @06:26PM (#5696953) Homepage
    This thread is no doubt inspired by the panel last night at the computer history museum on the legacy of Visicalc. It was a great time, and a lot of those of us who had worked on Visicalc's development and marketing came out, some I had not seen for 20 years.

    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)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @08:46PM (#5697849)
    We had a PDP-11/40 with six 20mA current loop connections pluggable to any of 22 campus jacks (five years ago the contractors for our UTP retrofit on the 1978 building spent most of a day scratching their heads about this bunch of wires). Apple ][s with cassette interfaces and plain old TVs were a godsend for teaching programming. A spreadsheet was manna. BeagleBrothers were gods. And in 1991 I was still able to communicte with a class in Sofia by a deuling banjos style interchange on their Pravetz clones in Apple graphics (PLOT and HPLOT and HPLOTTO on "GR" or "HGR" or "HGR2" were a universal language - like the Close Encounters scene...) i think the commands and such from Apple ][ are in my DNA now... I still have my HHGG from Infocom and a //c+ to run it on!

  • Skidding (Score:3, Interesting)

    by klui ( 457783 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @08:54PM (#5697881)
    It's interesting how Frankston talks about skidding. Since VisiCalc has a typeahead buffer, he did not buffer the arrow keys which prevented overshooting a destination on the slow Apple II.

    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)

    by Znonymous Coward ( 615009 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @09:58PM (#5698244) Journal
    ch00t, ch00t!

    ][ in middle east!

  • Headline should be "How to write a program" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Greg@UF ( 97388 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @09:59PM (#5698250)
    And all young programmers should be made to sit an exam based on this.

    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)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday April 09, 2003 @10:58PM (#5698593) Journal
    I remember when spreadsheet "macros" were the rage. Basically you record (or transcribe) the keystrokes used to select the menus and commands. Most menus were based on pressing a single letter to drill down to the next menu. Later they added an IF-statement and a goto of sorts, making it a Turing-complete language.

    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)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @12:38AM (#5698993) Journal
    I once invented spreadsheet software for Enron, it was called InvisiCalc.

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