VisiCalc on the Apple II | Hacker News Reader

VisiCalc on the Apple II

stonetools.ghost.io

108 pointshggh49 comments

One of my most vivid memories from youth is of the accountant who pulled up to a computer store I was hanging out in and announced to the clerk:

>I want a Visicalc.

After explaining that he would need a computer to run it and that the guy did not yet own one, the clerk then proceeded to put together a purchase which was not quite one (or more! Dual-Disk Drive setup) of every Apple product in the store, incl. a 132 column printer and an 80 col. display.

After ringing it up (for which the guy wrote out a check), I was enlisted to help load things into his black Trans Am and he drove off into the sunset.

The thing which most clearly echoed that after was using Lotus Improv on a NeXT Cube --- these days, I either use Google Docs, or pyspread --- really wish Flexisheet would compile under GNUstep or that there was some nice, elegant, multi-dimensional spreadsheet option with a clear, easy-to-understand formula pane (which was the big advantage of Improv --- all formulae were gathered in one place).

> Lotus Improv

A story that's not complete without Javelin (Plus) [1], a similar program with more longevity, and popularity in its particular niche, but much less fame.

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

Yeah, ages ago, when doing the composition for an encyclopedia I pointed out its omission, but unfortunately, things were too far along for it to be added.

Almost mentioned that I can't get anyone to buy me a license for Quantrix Financial Modeler either, but that felt a bit on-the-nose.

Black TransAm, you say??? "Smokey and the Bandit IV: The Bandit Does Your Taxes"

It's hard to over-estimate the tectonic impact the idea of spreadsheet had on the microcomputer scene at the time. Overnight 'programming' came to the masses. Someone with a problem (almost any kind of problem, scientific, financial, statistical, etc) could sit down, and easily start describing sequential flow, numerical manipulation and a ton of other things. It was the second coming of the International Business Machine.

The spreadsheet literally changed how business was run, and arguably a bunch of financial advances after it were directly because of it.

Being able to see values recalculated instantly was earthshattering in a way that even the Internet really wasn't.

So much opportunity I missed.

In the summer of 1981, I was a high school student who had been programming in BASIC for three years. I got a summer job at a company to write some utility programs in BASIC on an Apple II.

One program tracked all the land leasing they did, including location, date of expiration, number of square feet, cost/sqft. Once that was done I did some other programs. I went off to college and brought the program listings (in dot matrix greenbar paper) with me. Oh, I was paid $5/hour, which I just looked up would be $17.81/hour now. Then again, I burned up $5 gas and two hours of driving a day, and $5 at the cafeteria.

Every so often I'd get a call from the guy who used the program asking for a fix or enhancement. He didn't know how to program, and I didn't have a computer, so I'd just dictate "between lines 1280 and 1290, type "1291 IF F2 < 100 THEN 1320:F2=B2+1" or whatever.

I went back to the same job the next summer and they had visicalc. I wrote everything as visicalc spreadsheets on the same Apple II, and taught the user how it all worked. It took 10% of the time and I never got calls again -- the user could figure out how to tweak things.

The main problem was the Apple II could only produce 40 columns of text, which really sucked. You could buy a card which could put out 80x24 but for some reason they didn't want to spend the money even though it seemed like it would have paid for itself in faster navigation.

"If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer, you'd be interviewing somebody else right now!"

- Steve Jobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o

I had to beg to get the family to buy an Apple ][, but then someone handed me a pirated copy of VisiCalc and my dad wouldn't let it go. He was a recently minted MBA that had spent years grinding with SPSS and VisiCalc was a magical thing.

After that we always had nice printers and lots of storage as he started a consultancy and drove it all from that Apple ][. He even wrote documents in the spreadsheet, he refused all attempts to move to a proper word processor. Lots of fond memories there.

I bought a used VisiCalc box on eBay to run it on my restored Apple II and experience what it was like to use it back in a day on original hardware.

The quality of documentation is something I haven’t see in the last decade or two. It comes in a binder, well organized, thought out with good examples and no expectation of prior knowledge. It’s a joy to read. The only documentation I read thats better than this was the original Apple II Basic manual.

And the best part is it’s all keyboard based. Is there something like vim but for spreadsheets?

There's VisiData [https://www.visidata.org/]

VisiData isn't a spreadsheet, even though it looks like one.

True, but it might scratch some of the same itches.

Thanks, that looks interesting. It looks more like a data grid, but anything that has keyboard shortcuts to work with data is awesome. I’ll give it a try.

Lotus was great from the keyboard. People who are very good at Excel do use the keyboard heavily and it's a joy to watch.

Unless they removed it in recent releases, Excel has an option to mimic Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts.

Author here. Yes, I’m glad someone agrees with my assessment on the documentation quality. It pulls off a pretty amazing hat-trick, considering it was the first exposure anyone had with such a program.

`sc` is the only option I’m aware of that is like a “spreadsheet vim” though there are likely others.

Interestingly enough, the original name of sc was . . . wait for it . . . vc

One of the highlights of my work in tech was meeting someone I had read about in many computing history books, Bob Frankston, who dropped in for the Web 1.0 Conf at MIT Media Lab years ago. I was indifferent to the coffee choice at the event so I grabbed light toast, but he preferred dark roast coffee and politely but intently requested dark roast, so the next day I made sure we had both. That's where I learned that I preferred it too and I've been drinking dark roast ever since. Thanks Bob.

I wish I was in the room when he tried to demo Visicalc to the Atari developers, IIRC, the Atari documentary implied that a lot of them showed up to the demo stoned and were perhaps a little confused why they were being shown the demo.

Hard to over state how important Visicalc was. I was a Supercalc user under CP/M, really great software. "A superpower" in its day.

Sometimes I wonder if instead of struggling with office suites, I'd be better off running VisiCalc in an emulator. Low memory usage, high portability, and you know they're not going to change the UI on you.

Or just an earlier version of Excel.

I guess whichever has the most parseable format and plays nice with virtual printer drivers. And when sharing a spreadsheet with someone, you can share the entire spreadsheet application software, no incompatibilities :)

Software optimized for early model Macintosh computers runs well on later ones.

WriteNow on a Quadra 950 is very fast, I don't have a spreadsheet application from the same era.

Consider ‘sc’ - dates from 1981, still actively maintained.

https://github.com/n-t-roff/sc (active fork)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/resolute/en/man1/sc-im....

Installable on mac and unix as ‘sc-im’

It depends upon your needs, but the over simplified answer is: probably not.

I'm not talking about the over all design philosophy behind such old software. It may be better for getting things done in terms of the interface and, as you mentioned, there's high portability. By portability, I assume you mean you can run it on anything that has an emulator for it.

The trouble is how tied to the hardware it was. For example: 80 column mode was limited to particular video cards, and support didn't include the 80 column support found on later Apple II's. Have extra memory (such as an emulated 128 kB Apple IIe, so again were talking about very common hardware)? Well, you're stuck to the 64 kB (or less) of an Apple II or II+. Given that you have to restart the program to reclaim unused memory, this may be a bigger deal than anticipated.

Such old software is finicky. Even Lotus 1-2-3 on a PC emulator would have its quirks, albeit not to the same extreme.

Author here. I address data portability in a step-by-step process in the blog post. Long story short, it’s too much hassle while still being imperfect. If data sharing is important, it’s not a good choice. If you’re content to build a little spreadsheet that exists solely within the VisiCalc and VisiClone world, then it might suffice. I suspect the average user has higher baseline expectations than VisiCalc can deliver. You need to really try it out yourself (Dan Bricklin has the 80-column DOS version for free on his site) and see what it lacks firsthand.

If you're interested in the history of VisiCalc:

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app

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

Terrific, fun article. So many memories.

I worked at an Apple dealer as a kid. Was present for the Apple II Plus, Apple //e, ProDrive, Apple ///, Lisa, DEC Rainbow, dBase, Wizardry, Ultima. One of my gopher tasks was to fetch literature and inventory (mostly Z80 SoftCards) from "MicroSoft", just a few blocks away (downtown Bellevue).

My dad was a Symphony superfan. Created a nifty tax filing program, maintained for a few years, shared with friends & family. Before shareware became a thing. Since, I always equated databases and sheetsheets. (Still have PTSD caused by Microsoft's series of kludges. ODBC, ODE (?), ADO,...)

One day, dad came home with BoeingCalc. IIRC, the first commercial 3D spreadsheet. Alas, Boeing lost money on every sale, and wouldn't or couldn't spin it off as a separate biz unit.

IIRC, MicroRIM (first commercial relational database for PCs?) was started by former Boeing people. Back then, Boeing had to create internal tools for themselves, so did some pretty cool stuff.

Borland Quattro Pro Spreadsheet

40+ years ago..

Great keyboard recorder language! Edit to branch, compare, move entries, auto mixing randomly placed consecutive primes in a matrix array, where sums on columns, or products on columns, so all columns would become semi-equal, I recall often surprising difference plus/minus 1 for sums. Like the 1st pass of a magic square.

It was fun to make, and fun to watch, much slower back then.

Forgotten: WingZ [1]. In an era when they were trying to combine spreadsheet + charts + database + who-the-hell-knows-what-else.

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

Wingz, in its brief era, was really nice. In-sheet graphics before Excel had them, and more intuitive too.

I loved Quattro Pro. Version 1 was very good.

Turbo Pascal started to ship with an example spreadsheet program, as source. A co-worker took that source and ported it to a version of Pascal running on VAX/VMS. After that you could often see a VT-100 with a spreadsheet running, in his office.

This was before my time but I appreciate the write up and the nostalgia from folks in this thread.

My take away was that VisiCalc was a fairly straight forward technological problem, but a 10,000x+ impact idea. I feel like there are still idea's like this waiting in the shadows to be discovered by a lowly undergrad somewhere who tries something unique for the first time.

Author here. Thanks to OP for linking to my recent post and to the HN community for visiting and sharing their personal anecdotes. I’m glad to see a continuing shared interest in these classic productivity tools. I don’t blog about games at all, just retro productivity software, so if that floats your boat you may enjoy the other posts on my site.

It's not particularly subject related, but that CRT filter applied to a 4x pixel multiplied image is just wrong.

Author here. Sorry to disappoint you.

Brings back memories. As a teen working at a computer store in the early 80s, sold lots of Apple ][ machines with the customers buying it solely for use with VisiCalc (nobody bought the software due to rampant piracy in Asia).

And also surprisingly Osborne-1s with SuperCalc (mostly to Texan oilmen working in Indonesia who were in Singapore for R&R, and who needed number crunching out in the field)

One wonders if there are still features of these old keyboard-based spreadsheet programs that never made the jump to Excel and the like.

Author here. That is kind of one of my reasons for starting the blog, is to see what may have been forgotten in old productivity software.

What about the Mac? In 1988 I was using something that must have been called MacCalc or similar. It was neither Excel nor Lotus.

Maybe MultiPlan? Early Microsoft spreadsheet (before Excel) that ran on a number of microcomputers.

AppleWorks/ClarisWorks?

Author here. If not AppleWorks, Multiplan, Excel, or Lotus, then possibly “Full Impact?”

This? https://www.macintoshrepository.org/71070-maccalc

Could have been that. Whatever it was, it was standard software in use at Apple at the time. We were all using it.

I’ve always found it disconcerting that modern SaaS products advertise themselves as “spreadsheet replacements”. Actually, that’s the opposite of what I want.

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