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VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is generally considered to be the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool.
Origins Conceived by Dan Bricklin, refined by Bob Frankston, developed by their company Software Arts, and distributed by Personal Software in 1979 (later named VisiCorp) for the Apple II computer, it propelled the Apple from being a hobbyist's toy to being a much-desired, useful financial tool for business. This likely motivated IBM to enter the PC market which they had been ignoring until then. After the Apple II version, VisiCalc was also released for the Atari 8-bit family, the Commodore PET (both based on the MOS Technology 6502 processor, like the Apple), TRS-80 (based on the Zilog Z80 processor) and the IBM PC. According to Bricklin, he was watching his university professor at Harvard Business School create a financial model on a blackboard. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to tediously erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table, triggering Bricklin to realize that he could replicate the process on a computer using an 'electronic spreadsheet' to view results of underlying formulae. The successors Though the electronic spreadsheet was a revolutionary idea, Bricklin was advised that he would be unlikely to be granted a patent, so he failed to profit significantly from his invention. At the time, patent law had not been successfully applied to software (see software patents), so it was thought that the product could only be copyrighted, and as copyright deals with form rather than idea, competitors could quickly copy the concept and just present the result in a different layout without infringing the copyright. Charles Babcock of InformationWeek argues that in perspective, "VisiCalc was flawed and clunky, and couldn't do many things users wanted it to do." * Soon, more powerful clones of VisiCalc were released, including SuperCalc (1980), Microsoft's MultiPlan (1982), Lotus 1-2-3 (1983), and the spreadsheet module in AppleWorks (1984). With Microsoft Excel (introduced for the Mac OS in 1985 and for Windows 2.0 in 1987), a new generation of spreadsheets was born. Due to the lack of a patent, none of the developers of the VisiCalc clones had to pay any royalties to VisiCorp. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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