Implementing VisiCalc (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Implementing VisiCalc (2003)

landley.net

100 pointsmr_golyadkin17 comments

This design-first approach is the hallmark of many successful products. It is the rare engineer who can say "I had to change code that I had labored over" with such equanimity. Excellent read!

"The ability for Dan and I to work as a team was crucial. While he could've written the program, the fact that he wasn't gave him the freedom to focus on what the program should do rather than how to do it. I could appreciate his reasons and would eventually accept that I had to change code that I had labored over. We were able to find ways to take advantage of the limited space available for the program in deciding what features to include or not include."

If the user typed a character before the keyboard input buffer was emptied it would be lost.

Huh. I never noticed this. Then I recalled that my Apple ][ had a Videx Keyboard Enhancer. Turns out it provided an input buffer (besides providing upper/lower case which is the primary reason we added it). Now I'm wondering how much latency the buffer added and whether it reduced my high score on Lode Runner.

This is the kind of articles i cross my fingers to find in HN. This is a landmark application and it's great to be able to look inside the decisions required for it's successful creation.

There are not many technical articles that are in addition well-written. I think the market would be small but I would like to read biographies about people Jobs, Gates or others but from a technical perspective.

Visicalc was a landmark application and landmarks have multiple implications. On the one hand, it advanced computer capacities forward. On the other hand, it created a language of spreadsheets and of any spread-sheet-like-use of a computer and this language has been used ever since. And the thing about language is that having one language forecloses the possibility of other languages.

Online spreadsheets existed before Visicalc (I know because I worked with them in 1977), the innovation was the visi thing.

That's very interesting! Can you link to a description of one of them?

The actual source for which this appears to be a mirrored copy is actually still online.

http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc

Besides containing additional information, it doesn't have scattered formatting errors throughout.

OP's mirrored version seems to have fallen through a can opener. I'm unsure if it preserves anything significant however.

Relevant interviews with the VisiCalc creators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a5ex5QlocQ

> We did want to have enough precision to handle large numbers for both scientific calculations and in the unrealistic case it would be used to calculate the United States budget. Of course, as it turned out, that was one of the real applications.

What a gem. I have to say, so many of the hackers from the past strike me as fundamentally humble people. Some might say they were naieve, but this is a wonderful cautionary tale about the value of worst case thinking.

Dan Bricklin has his own website at http://www.bricklin.com.

The history section at http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm has quite a bit of info on VisiCalc. It also allows you to download an executable for DOS.

> Once we formed the company we decided to buy our own computer... The first project was to implement a simple editor and then an assembler and other development tools.

Different times, for sure. How I admire the men and women who forged a new profession during the wild west of computing!

> if VisiCalc for a different computer, where would you be?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o

Who wrote this? I can't find the author anywhere...

The upper left corner links to "Bob's other writings." So presumably it's by Bob.

Click on it and you'll see the full name is "Bob Frankston". It's Bob's web site.

Further click on "bio" and read http://rmf.vc/Bob_Frankston_Bio to confirm "1979-1985 Founded Software Arts in 1979 with Dan Bricklin to develop and sell VisiCalc."

Yeah, I was thrown by that attribution chain and the fact that the article is hosted on a site that apparently belongs to a "Rob Landley"...?

edit: I see now by the URL that it's a mirror. This kind of thing takes me back to the old days of the internet....

Source URL: http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc

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