Apple Computer without VisiCalc would have been an entirely different company. VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, was a major cause of the success of the Apple II, and attracted the attention of IBM to the microcomputer market. Read about VisiCalc at creator Dan Bricklin's site and a brief history at Braeburn.
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Member since:2005-06-29
RE[2]: Slashdot or OSNews?
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2005-07-06
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FTA:
"The success would not last long, though. In 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 was released, and outsold VisiCalc. Personal Software sued Software Arts in late 1983. The company failed, but Software Arts ended up selling VisiCalc to Lotus, who promptly discontinued the product. Bricklin never became wealthy off the spreadsheet, software patents did not exist then. They both got jobs at software firms after Software Arts was dismantled at Lotus. "
Software patents did not exist back then. I feel bad for the invetors; however, (software) patents have run wild.
Member since:2005-07-06
Patents probably would not work anyway as spreadsheets already existed in accounting.
The control squences were probably copyrightable but Lotus 1-2-3 used a diffirent set than Visicalc's.
And yes, most spreadsheeting does not need all the features found in modern code. A stripped down spreadsheat would be a lot faster and easyier to use. But it would probably fail for the same reason you rarely see people use WordPad instead of Word ... People are lazy and don't want to have to think about what is the best tool for the job. Learn one thing once and use it for all things, even if it is a pain in the &*^*(&^%^^%
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2005-09-03
I used to work with Dan Bricklin at Interland Web Hosting here in Atlanta, before I ended up leaving. Don't know if he still works there. Interland had bought the company that he worked at, Trellix. We had a couple good discussions about the symantic web. Weird guy, totally looks like a hippy with his grungy clothes and beard, but he's pretty cool.
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... from the man himself!
Check out
http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
and download the original MSDOS executable. Not exactly Excel, but it's about 25K or so - beat that!!
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2005-07-12
I remember using Visicalc back in the "old days" of micro computers (I truly am showing my age here). Just for fun, I downloaded the Visicalc disk image (dmk) from Ira GoldKlang's TRS-80 website and ran it on Xtrs, my TRS-80 emulator. It was a pretty fun trip back in time for me, to a time when computers and software were much simpler.
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If we had had software patents in the '80s, things like the Save button, the Print button, scroll bars, the Close button, etc, would have been patented and would still be covered by patent to this day. As a result, computer interface technology would be significantly behind where it is right now. Software patents are a bad, bad thing. Nowadays, whenever anybody creates a new button, icon, menu or graphic, they patent the hell out of it so no one else can use it without either paying through the nose or opening themselves up to potential litigation. Imagine what your computer would look like now if every little obvious thing we take for granted was patented in the '80s. Now imagine what computer technology will be like in the future because of the situation we find ourselves in right now.
