Today in 1995, IBM completed its $3.5 billion acquisition of Lotus Development, the developer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary.
Steven Levy on Dan Bricklin coming up with the idea of the electronic spreadsheet while studying at the Harvard Business School:
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?
Writing recently about a 12-year-old letting ChatGPT do his homework, Tim Harford quoted Levy’s essay and the story about how
one accountant behaved in response to one of the first digital spreadsheet programs, around 1980… when he received “a rush task, sat down with his micro and his spreadsheet, finished it in an hour or two, and left it on his desk for two days. Then he Fed Ex-ed it to the client and got all sorts of accolades for working overtime.” …
The digital spreadsheet is an example of “skill-biased technological change” that helps productive people to be even more productive. For about half a century, skill-biased technological change has been the norm and an important reason why income inequality has increased over the decades. But as the satnav and the shearing frame show, some new technologies enhance the productivity of less expert workers. This will not automatically reduce inequality — the shearing frames might have helped unskilled workers a little, but mostly they profited capitalists.
So what of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Bard? Do they multiply the output of elite workers, or do they provide most help to those who need it?