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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!

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

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.

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