Today in 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston released the first production copy of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet and the first killer app for personal computers.
Bob Metcalfe on Steve Jobs:
Then there was the time Steve invited me down to Cupertino to show me VisiCalc running on the Apple II–you know, the spreadsheet before Lotus 1-2-3, which was the spreadsheet before Excel. Steve was telling me that this would be the killer app for his PC. Having never seen a paper spreadsheet before, after escaping Steve’s reality distortion field that day, I didn’t get it. This didn’t slow Steve down. Sometime later, when the VCs (venture capitalists) asked me for a five-year projection of 3Com revenues getting to $50M, then I bought an Apple II as my VisiCalc machine. Steve then introduced me to his investors.
VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies in six years. While it was the first electronic spreadsheet for personal computers, Bricklin and Frankston did not seek a patent for it, and more sophisticated clones were soon released, including SuperCalc (1980), Microsoft’s MultiPlan (1982), Lotus 1-2-3 (1983), and Microsoft’s Excel (for the Macintosh in 1985 and for Windows 2.0 in 1987).
As Dan Bricklin remembers it, the idea first came to him in the spring of 1978 while he was sitting in a classroom at the Harvard Business School. It was the kind of idea—so obvious, so right— that made him immediately wonder why no one else had thought of it. And yet it was no accident that this breakthrough should have been his…
The question Bricklin was pondering that day in 1978 concerned how he might use what he knew about computers to help him in his finance course. This was the assignment: he and several other students had been asked to project the complicated financial implications—the shift in numbers and dollars, and the shifts resulting from these shifts—of one company’s acquisition of another.
Bricklin and his classmates would need ledger sheets, often called spreadsheets. Only by painstakingly filling in the pale green grids of the spreadsheets would they get an accurate picture of the merger and its consequences. A row on the ledger might represent an expense of a category of revenue; a column might represent a specific period of time – a day, a month, a year. Run your finger across, say, a row of figures representing mortgage payments for a certain property, and the number in each “cell” of the horizontal row would be the figure paid in the time period represented by that particular vertical column. Somewhere on the sheet the columns and rows would be tallied, and that information would be entered on even larger sheets.
The problem with ledger sheets was that if one monthly expense went up or down, everything – everything – had to be recalculated. It was a tedious task, and few people who earned their MBAs at Harvard expected to work with spreadsheets very much. Making spreadsheets, however necessary, was a dull chore best left to accountants, junior analysts, or secretaries. As for sophisticated “modeling” tasks – which, among other things, enable executives to project costs for their companies – these tasks could be done only on big mainframe computers by the data-processing people who worked for the companies Harvard MBAs managed.
Bricklin knew all this, but he also knew that spreadsheets were needed for the exercise; he wanted an easier way to do them. It occurred to him: why not create the spreadsheets on a microcomputer?