Apple's early success stemmed from a tiny 20kb computer program they didn't make | Hacker News Reader

Apple's early success stemmed from a tiny 20kb computer program they didn't make

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59 pointsrylandking38 comments

The headline on the article (and the <title> tag, from what I can see) is "The 20KB Computer Program That Changed The World"; the title used here seems like it's deliberately reaching for an anti-Apple spin. I mean, WordPerfect absolutely sold hundreds of thousands of DOS computers, but "Microsoft's early success stemmed from a [insert size of WordPerfect] program they didn't make" would...raise eyebrows, wouldn't it?

Yes, the title is clickbait. But there has been endless snide commentary over the past 4-5 decades about Excel and Word being ripoffs of other companies' inventions.

Hell, Microsoft famously didn't develop MS-DOS!

DOS = disk operating system for anyone curious

disk = an obsolete long-term storage medium, in case anyone was wondering

storage medium = what people used before we all ascended to the cloud, in case anyone was wondering

wondering = what we used to do before the internet, if anyone was curious

HN is not turning into reddit at all.

Wouldn’t that be DOSFAC?

True, true. (Although I'm not sure if Excel and Word are ripoffs except to the degree that word processors and spreadsheets already existed.)

I wonder what the amount of manpower is today, outside of Apple, that boosts Apple sales.

Are there more people working "for" Apple than there are people working for Apple?

Really the entire personal computer industry's early success was due to VisiCalc, followed by Lotus 1-2-3. Likewise for WordStar, then WordPerfect. It was the first thing I ever heard referred to in the press as a "killer app", which I think of every time someone here makes the claim that nobody called applications "apps" before the iOS App Store.

There's some nuance there though, "killer app" is sometimes short for "application" in the sense of "use" not "program"[1]. When Steve Jobs said "the killer app is making calls." in the iPhone intro, he wasn't talking about the dialer app.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application#Usage

That was his attempt to stretch and own the term. The term that had been credited instead of St. Jobs with Apple's success.

Later on the App Store could certainly be credited with Apple's success, but not during the iPhone intro, though? I think people had been saying "our killer app is X" (where X was not a piece of software but an approach to doing something) for quite a while before that.

I actually used Microsoft Multiplan for a short time.

Both Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony remain embedded in my muscle memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan

> every time someone here makes the claim that nobody called applications "apps" before the iOS App Store.

Also I remember that many warez sites used to have a section called “appz” where you could find cracked applications for Windows. This was before the iPhone even existed.

Terminologically speaking, it's always been applications in the Apple world, since at least the Macintosh in 1984. The type for an executable program was APPL. And I don't think that's for "Apple", though it's a sound association marketers might like.

It does makes sense to distinguish the software on the machine you run to maintain the machine (most software, once upon a time) from the software you run to do your actual work. Now that iOS and Android are mostly set it and forget it, I'm not surprised app has come back. Though the App Store is surely an influence.

This is crazy petty, I know, but the article starts with “You’ve never heard of Dan or Bob. But you should have.”

I mean, I do know about VisiCalc. But even if I didn’t, don’t try to shame me for it — learning is awesome. This kind of negging from a blog post always makes me dismiss it as linkbait even when the subject matter (as with this piece) is actually pretty good.

When I read this, I don't think the article is criticizing me, the reader. Rather, I think the article is criticizing the world that allowed the reader to never hear of Dan or Bob (as apparently Dan and Bob were pretty cool and everybody should hear about them).

“You should have heard of this” is always an (implicit) criticism of whoever you should have heard it from (e.g. your parents, teachers, doctor, pastor, boss, news media, or the society at large), not a criticism of you yourself.

But here the intended meaning is more along the lines of “it is unfortunate that we all collectively pay so much attention to Bill & Steve but don’t also remember and celebrate Dan and Bob”.

I don't find it petty at all. Authors who resort to these tricks for positive effects should answer to the negative effects too.

Dan Bricklin was at some local tech event I was at several years back. I sort of recognized him, but had to surreptitiously check his name badge to be sure. Being old, I [sort of] knew who he was but figured most of the folks in our circle wouldn’t.

Intending to honor him, I dropped a line about how smart the team who created Lotus 1-2-3 must have been. Needless to say, Dan was not as amused/honored at my reference as I’d intended (had I gotten his product correct).

Seems like you took that pretty personally. I would interpret it as they have not been given the notoriety they deserve based on their impact.

No one is shaming you. This is a critique of history failing to emphasize the importance of Dan and Bob, not a critique of what you know.

I don't even understand how someone reads that sentence and then assumes it is an attack on them, the reader. It's such a common literary refrain "You've never heard of FOO, but you should have".

That's a nice snippet of the original source code! Does anyone recognize the language? Googling tells me that VisiCalc was written in Apple II (6502) assembly, but this is clearly not that.

I imagine the answer is somewhere in here: http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc

Great link! The answer is that it's written in a custom 6502 assembler macro language that abstracted over looping, and the macros were an extension of a 6502 assembler that was hosted on Multics.

Yeah, pretty cool to see a photo of that. It was coded in assembler, first for the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor used in the Apple II.

Looks like macro-heavy assembly to me. If one is not familiar with macro assemblers, in summary you could write your own language in macro assembler. And some did, which makes for a great debugging session if you're the one that has to fix it long after the original dev left.

This page explains better than I ever will: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/assembly_programming/assembly...

OT: I had a research project many years ago (it feels strange that I can now call it "many") that was to translate a program into C. The original program was written in "FORCE", which was a macro language extension on top of Fortran that we no longer had a compiler for. It was absolutely fascinating.

Great example that good software is more important than good hardware. The best hardware will not sell if the user experience is poor due to bad software. The opposite is much easier. As long as the software works reasonably well, customers are more likely to overlook problems in the hardware. That's why there are still so many crappy Windows laptops. The screen is bad, the keyboard is creaky, and the display is from 2010, but Windows works for most users. So people buy.

Software vs hardware: there's an urban legend that when this came out, accountants would walk into electronics stores and say "I want to buy a Visicalc!"

Well, they kinda did buy Visicalc. It's just that the dongle was kinda big and expensive...

Not sure I'd have called 20kB tiny at the time!

True! Bob Frankston actually worked super hard to get VisiCalc's code to fit inside 16KBs so it could be used on the lower-end Apple II. But he couldn't make it happen. So it only ended up as usable on the more expensive $2,500 Apple II

Nowadays, they'd just cut features from the 20KB version to make it fit into 16KB and sell it as the Standard edition (and sell the full 20KB one as the "Premium HD+" edition).

I don’t read it as anti-Apple, maybe I don’t have that annoyance sensor. If you remember the phrase “killer app”, the OG killer app was Visicalc. People would buy your thing if it had a killer app. There were a great many more options for computers at the time. Were you going to get an Amiga, a TRS-80, a Commodore 64, a Sinclair, or any of the others?

Apple didn’t make the software that made it so successful. Not a problem, we all need friends.

20Kb was not tiny back in the day

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