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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> Excel may be the most influential software ever built

I'd argue that award should go to the real pioneers of spreadsheet applications: LANpar, VisiCalc, and to an extent Lotus 1-2-3 and LoGisTiX. What has really stood the test of time is the concept of spreadsheets, not anything specific to Excel.

Excel didn't do anything particularly revolutionary, it didn't set out to "influence" anything. It just competed on feature-matching and cut-throat commercial practices until all the others had died. A great achievement for sure, but praising that over VisiCalc and Lotus is a bit like praising Toyota over Henry Ford when it comes to automobile production chains.

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Well, the linked article points out that Excel's engineers came up with a new, better, and much faster way of doing recalculation than Visicalc and 1-2-3 had at that point -- and it was arguably the first spreadsheet program built for the GUI era. Both of those things were new features, and they really mattered. Excel didn't win just based on marketing alone.

the same people who designed and built Microsoft Multiplan (a dud if there ever was one) also went on to create Excel, an odyssey that started in 1983, and that version was created for an early version of Windows that didn't get any traction, and then Excel was rebuilt for the Mac, so that's v2 (3 if you count Multiplan), and then when recreated again it finally took off after many years with the success of Microsoft Windows 3.0 starting in 1990.

Excel only won from the years of longevity provided by a deep pockets company with a vested interest in extending its monopoly, with a little help from Lotus who really dropped the ball on the switchover to GUIs

There was a really useful spreadsheet application for DEC's RSTS/E... named "calc" maybe? The innovative part of it was a cell formula included an output directive.

So the normal excel formula in cell b1 of "=sum(a1..a26)" has it's output written to b1. But with calc you could in cell b1 put "b2=sum(a1..a26)" and the result would be written to b2.

This became super powerful when dealing with ranges. You could have 1 formula that that calculate the row-wise total for each row... and it would be in 1 cell, so for example "$1..$10=sum($1..$9)" (forgive me I can't recall the addressing specifics for relative/fixed/named ranges).

It was pretty amazing at the time.

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