It’s the 40th anniversary of VisiCalc, the first popular spreadsheet program, and the anniversary has prompted some new remembrances of the killer app that, true to its “power to the people” origins, got people playing with data — and, by popularizing personal computers, helped to change the world.
Something about spreadsheets popularising the PC always fascinated me. Out of all the things computers can do – it’s tabulating numbers that played an important role in their spread.
In the early 1980s I was involved in the administration of a small design collective in London. I was 28 and I had heard about personal computers but I had never used one nor did I know much about what they did. I was sceptical that PCs had a role in my life.
Then I heard that the Greater London Council was running hands-on workshops to introduce people to these new PCs so I went along to find out what these things did.
Part of my job was keeping a set of sales and purchase ledgers. This involved hand writing entries of sales and purchases into ledger pages, as many as forty entries stacked up on a page, with breakdown columns showing what each purchase or sales item was composed of. Each page had to be totalled at the bottom using a calculator, as did every column, and if the sum of the column entries didn’t match the grand total you knew you had made a mistake somewhere on the page and you had to go back and use a ruler to mover down the page an entry line at a time to check for errors. Utterly tedious and error prone.
When I got to the computer workshop I was confronted by PCs running MS-DOS so all you could see was that intimidating green text C prompt on a black screen. I asked one of the people to show me how this strange thing could help me in my job. So he started up a spreadsheet program (it was the first time I heard that word) and showed me how to recreate my ledgers except the program added everything up and it was all error checked automatically. I vividly remember this moment he entered the Sum formulae and the total of all the entries above appeared because it was at that exact moment that I became a PC enthusiast. Within a few months we had managed to buy a cheap Amstrad computer for our office and the rest is history.
Even now one of my favourite things is setting up a big and powerful sprearsheet
Great radio programme from a great series:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz2w9
https://www.slideshare.net/kfrdbs/peyton-jones
Some argue spreadsheets are functional programming environments.
They say basic Excel is Turing Complete and someone implemented an Excel Turing Machine here http://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 . However I am not so sure as it can’t halt, because it is always halted. VB and macros aside, you can only iterate by manually pasting or dragging. Spreadsheets only have a sense of space, no sense of time. Halting implies time.
In late 87 / early 88 I took on the task of cleaning up the population estimate spreadsheets in the council office where I was working. Some already existed, but there were minor layout differences everywhere, preventing automation with macros. All I had to do was pick one as the master / template to do the calculations, put raw data for each census Collection District into identically laid out non-calculating sheets, then write macros for the master sheet to import data sets from one or more of those data storage sheets. The people upstairs in Community Services had been waiting for these estimates for weeks (months?), and heard what I’d done – when they gave me a handful of custom areas and got the results back half an hour later they thought I was a miracle-worker. 😀
Seeing what was possible in Multiplan, and in its “panes”, meant that I made sure to buy Windows and Excel when I bought my first computer two years later.
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