In 1979, VisiCalc was released for the Apple II, and to this day, many consider it the very first spreadsheet program. Considering just how important spreadsheets have become since then – Excel rules the world – the first spreadsheet program is definitely an interesting topic to dive into. It turns out that while VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for home computers, it’s not actually the first spreadsheet program, period. That honour goes to LANPAR, created ten years before VisiCalc.
Ten years before VisiCalc, two engineers at Bell Canada came up with a pretty neat idea. At the time, organizational budgets were created using a program that ran on a mainframe system. If a manager wanted to make a change to the budget model, that might take programmers months to create an updated version.
Rene Pardo and Remy Landau discussed the problem and asked “what if the managers could make their own budget forms as they would normally write them?” And with that, a new idea was created: the spreadsheet program.
The new spreadsheet was called LANPAR, for “LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random” (but really it was a mash-up of their last names: LANdau and PARdo).
↫ Jim Hall at Technically We Write
While there wasn’t a graphical user interface on the screen with a grid and icons and everything else we associate with a spreadsheet today, it was still very much a spreadsheet. Individual cells were delinianated with semicolons, you could write down formulas to manipulate these cells, and the program could do forward referencing. The idea was to make it so easy to use, managers at Dell Canada could make budgeting changes overnight, instead of having programmers take weeks or months to do so.
I’m not particularly well-versed in Excel and spreadsheets in general, but I can definitely imagine advanced users no longer really seeing the grids and numbers as individual entities, instead visualising everything much more closely to what LANPAR did. Like Neo when he finally peers through the Matrix.
The name makes sense. I have often thought that the contemporary spreadsheet is just a visualization tool of arrays (i.e. a grid of variables addressed in two dimensions.)
Following on the Neo/Matrix analogy, I would also liken experienced spreadsheet users to chess players, who also no longer need the visual grid of the board – and instead can reference any game using linear spatial notation.
It baffles me how many that are unable to learn typical programming can do spreadsheets pretty well. I suspect is the special arrangement of the cells. There are some people that have a hard time programming because they can’t understand variables and where they hold their value, yet they can understand pretty well a spreadsheet where they can actually visualise the data in some place.
I guess that’s specially true for those that learnt in a spreadsheet. And in general, accounting books of yonder are pretty similar to a spreadsheet, so that it is no wonder someone coming from accounting could find it quite easy to learn using a spreadsheet, which is in its own, a form of programming.
“Dell Canada” is an obvious typo and should be corrected to Bell Canada.
I work with many business analysts, who are great with Excel but feel they can’t program.
I don’t think Thom is correct. The visual grid and display is precisely what enables many advanced Excel users feel comfortable. Could they adapt? Sure. But why? There’s a reason that spreadsheets moved to the current display mode ~half a century ago.