My journey into personal computer software development in 1983

There was at least SuperCalc, and Multiplan from MS. But those were really still from the 8-bit world. Lotus was able to start again from scratch with the large memory potential of the PC.

MS did a version of Multiplan for the Macintosh. It was amazing! Mice and spreadsheets were a match made in heaven. But it was just a pre-cursor for Excel, and did not last long.

https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113026/oh...

Bricklin: Both. We couldn’t afford to spend money on time-sharing. We could buy our own machine. In those days, development – a lot of people did development, as Bob explained, on another machine. And then from that other machine, you loaded to the micro because the development systems on the micros weren’t up to it. That’s how Microsoft Basic was done – that’s how Microsoft ended up having a PDP-10 I think. They eventually used XENIX to do their development. We did the same thing. We developed all our own tools over the years. We improved the tools. We wrote our own implementation language, a higher level language. In fact, that’s one of the issues that eventually came in, is that in the early days of the PC industry, there were so many different machines and you didn’t know which was a winner. You sold to each manufacturer. So you had to port all over the place. That’s what Digital Research was – a porting company. Microsoft was a porting company. That’s what we did. We had to figure out ways to port the same product and cookie cutter it out. And everybody went a little different and you had to fight with them. Otherwise, the costs would go up. So we eventually moved things to a higher level language. We did our version 2 of VisiCalc, in a higher level language.

Ceruzzi: What language?

Bricklin: We wrote it in something we called IL, which is a Lisp derivative. It was like writing in Java or something like that today. An interpreter. Microsoft had a similar type of thing for Multiplan. They wrote in a language which let them use a cookie cutter to put it on many different machines. But the Apple II version of the VisiCalc II (VAV) was written in assembly code. We realized that to port that was going to be so expensive. When we ported from the Apple II and Apple III, doing the IIe was next, then to port to the IBM PC it’s a different code base. The way we did the VisiCalc code base is, since we had our own tools, we hired Seth Steinberg, who had worked at the [MIT] Architectural Machine Group – Media Lab, real experience, real bright guy, helped bring a culture into our company. Free Cokes came from him. He ordered it and all that stuff. Lotus and others all copied this. It helped bring that type of environment from MIT into our company and spread hopefully to others. What Seth did is he said, “I’m going to do an idiomatic translation, basically, from the 6502 code to a Z80 code to do the TRS80.” And what he did was he modified the compiler to list the two sources synced on labels. The compiler we used had macros and it had no ‘go-to’s in it. Basically it was all IF THEN ELSE and stuff. It was a macro assembler"

https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113026/oh...

- in the pre-PC era, the microcomputer ecosystem was extremely fragmented in terms of architectures, CPUs, and OS's. 6502, z80, 68K, z8000, 8088. DOS, CPM, CPM/86, etc. Our publisher (Personal Software) wanted as much breadth of coverage, as you might imagine

- one strong positive benefit of porting from 6502 assembly to IL and using an interpreter was that it enabled the core code to remain the same while leaving the complex work of paging and/or memory mapping to the interpreter, enabling access to 'extended memory' without touching or needing to re-test the core VisiCalc code. Same goes for display architectures, printer support, file system I/O, etc.

- another strong benefit was the fact that, as the author alludes to, the company was trying to transition to being more than a one hit wonder by creating a symbolic equation solver app - TK!Solver - that shared the interpreter.

Of course, the unavoidable result is that the interpreter - without modern affordances such as JIT compilation - was far less snappy than native code. We optimized the hell out of it and it wasn't unusable, but it did feel laggy.

Fast forward to when I left SoftArts and went across the street to work for my friend Jon Sachs who had just co-founded Lotus with Mitch Kapor. Mitch & Jon bet 100% that the PC would reset the ecosystem, and that the diversity of microcomputers would vanish.

Jon single-handedly wrote 1-2-3 in hand-tuned assembly language. Yes, 1-2-3 was all about creating a killer app out of 1.spreadsheet+2.graphics+3.database. That was all Mitch. But, equally, a killer aspect of 1-2-3 was SPEED. It was mind-blowing. And this was all Jon. Jon's philosophy was that there is no 'killer feature' that was more important than speed.

When things are moving fast and the industry is taking shape, you make the best decisions you can given hunches about the opportunities you spot, and the lay of the technical and market landscape at that moment. You need to make many key technical and business decisions in almost an instant, and in many ways that determines your fate.

Even in retrospect, I think the IL port was the right decision by Dan & Bob given the microcomputing ecosystem at the time. But obviously Mitch & Jon also made the right decision for their own time - just a matter of months later. All of them changed the world.

The premise was that people were already pushing the limits and building incredibly elaborate systems on spreadsheets, so why not go to the next level and leverage the huge processing power of big iron. Actually a very solid idea and I worked with a few progressive customers that bought into it.

My job was as a sales engineer, helping customers adopt it in Europe, particularly Scandanavia. It's Tuesday so it must be Copenhagen. What a great job and a super team in lotus at the time.

If it were by the original IBM tale, Xerox and others dead companies were thriving. I recommend to read "Idea Man", Paul Allen (Microsoft cofounder) autobiography. You will realize there was an incredible Bill Gates before the IBM deal. Also check the non-official chronicles of Bill Gates in "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" [2] (1993).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp...

I don't know. How many?

UI/UX development is a two-way street. The OS includes a basic set of UI controls for common scenarios. But it can't anticipate every situation.

MS Office's Ribbon is designed to show only the actions available given the current selection and document. A toolbar would show available actions, but also have the invalid actions disabled, increasing required screen space. Is there some other standard Windows control that could have worked instead of the custom Ribbon?

Oh the joys of being brown in the Tech Industry.

In actuality, there's a direct relationship between how good a person thinks they are and how good they actually are. Not inverse. The Dunning-Kruger effect is that the people at the low end of the scale tend to rate themselves as slightly better than they are, and people at the high end of the scale tend to rate themselves as slightly worse than they are. The best people know they're good, but they tend to think they're not the best. The worst people know they're bad, but they tend to think they're not the worst.