The History of VisiCalc (1999-2018) | Hacker News Reader

The History of VisiCalc (1999-2018)

bricklin.com

103 pointsdamir19 comments

Just "wasted" an hour this morning playing around with a OSS recreation of VisiCalc [0]

This repo contained a link to the manual. Holy cow! [1]

EDIT: This program is awesome. I was surprised and impressed by the screen splitting and whatnot. I'm paying off some debt, and I'll be using this program to track this now, unironically.

From the introduction:

> But the power of the VisiCalc program lies in the fact that the computer remembers the formulas and calculations you use while working through a problem. If you change a value on the worksheet, all related values change as the VisiCalc program recalculates the entire worksheet.

> ...

> Playing "what if" with the VisiCalc program is often a matter of changing a single value. If you enter a value at one location, you can copy it to any number of other positions. You can change, insert, delete, or move entire rows or columns. The worksheet is instantly restructured so that all relationships correspond to the changes. Doing the same thing with a calculator, pencil, and paper could take hours of erasing and recalculating .

Very prescient.

[0] https://github.com/geoffmoss0/VisiCalc [1] http://toastytech.com/manuals/VisiCalc%201.1.pdf

I remember a time when my nerd friends all had Sinclair ZX81s[1] with 1k of RAM. My dad was a chemical engineer, so bought an HP85a[2] which was the sort of computer you would use to control lab equipment etc. I remember showing it to my friends:

1. Built in screen

2. Built in THERMAL PRINTER!

3. Built in magnetic tape drive (Sinclairs had to use a cassette player which was way way worse).

4. Massive, overwhelming 32k of ram!!![3]

On the one hand it could run visicalc. On the other hand, their computers could run games.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 [2] https://oldcomputers.net/hp85.html [3] With an expansion cartridge you plugged into the back

Some of the Triangulation podcasts feature interviews with:

Bob Frankston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BAV69CPXzA Dan Bricklin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh0KBkC_21s

I'm slightly too young to have ever used VisiCalc, but that was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

The Founders at Work book interview with Bricklin was pretty cool too. Lots of interesting stories and details on their development problems and design choices.

> I had it make a sound every time it recalculated a cell, but it turned out that the making of the sound on the Apple used up three-quarters of the CPU time, because it did it with a timing loop.

> If you showed it to a computer person who didn’t have those needs, they’d say, "That’s kind of cool, but what’s so special about that? I could just do it in Basic."

> Well, this was, "What’s the variable name going to be?"... Today it seems so natural: you use A1. Well, first of all, it was A1, not 1 comma 1. It is too many keystrokes, it’s not normal for people, and there’s a whole lot of problems with it. By going to the map coordinate type of thing— A1, G7, or something like that—that was something I knew regular people would understand.

The A1 type notation was already in use with computerised spreadsheets so it definitely wasn't new. As was the principle of cells holding formulae. In 1978 I was maintaining (as a trainee programmer) old Cobol based mainframe systems like that. The innovation was the visual element plus instant update.

I highly recommend reading this. VisiCalc is the original spreadsheet and Bricklin details the whole story of its invention. So many gems about how he got around constraints, and added others to make the user experience simple. And spreadsheets still basically behave the same today!

Re: "And spreadsheets still basically behave the same today!"

Uh, not sure that's a good thing. For certain tasks, I've seen better UI models and sheet idioms. I agree it's flexible, just awkward for certain needs.

Of course it doesn't fit all possible needs but for the vast majority of what most people need, it is more than enough.

For all the talk of various frameworks and machine learning we have on here, the spreadsheet as it came in Visicalc (via Excel) is the backbone of accounting the world over. Not for everything but for a lot.

No it wasn't the original spreadsheet. It was the original visual interactive spreadsheet.

Killer site (not a “read”) about the thing that created the term killer app. This meant, you bought the hardware because you wanted the software.

At the risk of being a hypeman, I think you should take a look. Just for funsies (though I’d gladly sell you a visicalc license).

It’s weird like it’s from 1999, but visicalc was even 10 years before that. I thought this page was fun:

http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

The website and the cover of the linked book Serious Play (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0875848141/softwgarde...) have such a 90s vibe, it's making me nostalgic.

I remember first hearing about Bricklin when I was young, from a PBS documentary (Triumph of the Nerds).

Hearing the VisiCalc story, particularly how little he benefited financially from it's success given Lotus' release, made me sad at the time.

Made a tribute to VisiCalc in Google Sheets. Tried to recreate the look and feel. And used Apps Script to code up some features.

While creating this I ended up reading all 265 pages of the original VisiCalc user's Manual and recreating the keystroke guide. And watched as many interviews with Dan as I could find.

Found him talking to a class in 2019 with a working emulator.

And also got to read about the launch of the Apple II and VisiCalc. Just like any geeks, they were excited to play the games the computer came with.

Https://bettersheets.co/visicalc

Its free to check out. And copy to your Google drive.

I have a copy of VisiCalc on a 5¼" floppy that I can boot on a IBM 5155 'luggable'.

It is surprisingly 1-2-3 like. You can see that Lotus directly ripped off Dan conceptually. I don't have enough background to know if Lotus 1-2-3 implemented significant improvements over VisiCalc; I do think that Dan Bricklin was a visionary to see that a 'what-if?' analysis on a blackboard would be an incredible exercise in what came to be called a spreadsheet.

[The luggable boots a version of DOS that doesn't support sub-directories, so it is pre-2.0.]

It was definitely a revolutionary concept. Subsequent lawsuits, e.g. with Quattro and 1-2-3, determined it wasn't IP-protectable for the most part. But VisiCalc absolutely laid out a fundamentally incredibly important application model for which the creators never made a lot of money. (And fundamentally different variants of VisiCalc never went much of anywhere.)

The same could be said of the web but this is even truer.

Back then software copyrights and patents were even murkier than they are now.

A few years ago I had a copy of visicalc.exe sitting around on a USB drive. It runs fine on whatever version of Windows I had back then - Win7 or newer. For all I know, the same executable still runs on Windows 11.

There no 16-bit emulation (NTVDM) in Windows 11 (since it’s 64-bit only). 32-bit Windows 10 would run VisiCalc fine, though.

Title is very misleading. The dates appear to be from the copyright at the bottom of the page. Work on Visicalc started in '79, by '99 it was long gone.

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