Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year | Hacker News Reader

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

theregister.com

15 pointspseudolus12 comments

Excel: the universal Enterprise Resource Planning tool! Not exactly liked by the developer crowd, I know (and sometimes even for good reasons), but still a mostly-useful force to be reckoned with.

Also a technical achievement for the history books (in the DOS era, Lotus 1-2-3 truly pushed the envelope and was the reason for early 'extended memory' standards, but on both Mac and Windows, Excel truly shined, allowing much larger sheets than were possible before, despite the meager hardware resources available).

Also, a true source of feature innovation. 'Autofill', first seen in 1992, was possibly the first 'AI' (and yeah I know), and even the features that were absolutely useless (like the ability to modify sheet values by manipulating a graph, introduced in Office 95, which I remember demo-ing to great applause during the European intro tour) made a mark, as did the UI.

Of all the current 'Office'-style apps, Excel is the only one that is probably still irreplaceable for me. And yeah, I know, it messes up CSV imports by default, which has reportedly set back DNA research by hundreds of years, but that's just a matter of teaching future scientists to use Data/From Text-or-CSV as intended, and will thus sort itself out within the lifetime of this very useful product...

Excel (and spreadsheets in general) is one of the greatest inventions in history.

There is hardly anything useful you can do with computers that you can't do in Excel. Spreadsheets are a higher level abstraction to computation itself.

I can't boot bare metal into Excel, I need an operating system designed around Excel where everything isn't a file, it's a cell

Sounds like the attempt at implementing Tuple Spaces on the Inmos Transputer.

Google tried something with Fuchsia. They didn't get far. /s

> There is hardly anything useful you can do with computers that you can't do in Excel.

Like to live the bloody data alone and not transform it into a date and then to use black magic to turn it back ? /s

Fun facts, originally when launched by both Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft back in 1985 at Tavern on the Green, New York, Excel has 16,384 rows and 256 columns. The original Excel's rows now exactly matched the Excel's current column where now Excel has a row limit of 1,048,576 rows and a column limit of 16,384 columns.

Maybe the only/greatest failure of Excel is to not have a more continuous development path to "real" applications. There are some absolute wizards who make wonders within the limited confines of Excel, but hit a complexity wall when making the jump to a standalone app or web service.

Well, what usually turns out when you want to move an Excel to a web application - is that the flexibility is gone. Now you need to think how you display something to the user, develop the functionality in code, write tests, have that code reviewed, have the product checked by infosec and have them come around with their bullshit checkbox-security bingo, plan a release, do that release, do the aftercare.

So Excel is quite a bit easier.

And before that, used VisiCalc and MultiPlan

And Lotus 1-2-3 (and the "/" commands).

And SuperCalc with iterative calculations

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