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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Gosh, it's telling that as early as 1983 (!) the inventors of the spreadsheet thought that spreadsheets were 'done' and they needed to move to more important things. This is like Rickenbacker in 1938 deciding that electric guitars were 'done' and moving to, I don't know, Theremins or something.

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I think the attitude is more the result of lack of competition. All of this was from before my time but doing a quick check on Wikipedia shows that VisiCalc came out in 1979 where 1-2-3 came out in 1983. I’m not familiar enough with the spreadsheet software landscape from the early 1980s but given that the article mentions 1-2-3 specifically I am going to assume there wasn’t really any real competition for at least 4 years. It can be easy to think that the future is in a new product since they seemingly had little to no competition in their original market for 4 years

1-2-3 was 3rd generation. VisiCalc, while groundbreaking, was quite crude. Its fundamental utility outweighs its lack of sophistication. It was quite 1.0, and once the cat was out of the bag, it was hardly secret tech.

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.

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