VisiCalc was the first
spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the
microcomputer from a hobby for
computer enthusiasts into a serious
business tool.
VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies in six years.
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
. At the time, most microcomputers suffered from lack of storage space and display limitations that made them poor competitors in the
word processing and
database markets. The spreadsheet, however, did not depend on powerful displays or storage media, and so was an ideal fit for microcomputer technology available at the time. 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,
TRS-80, 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
.
Successors
Charles Babcock of
InformationWeek argues that in retrospect, “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
Macintosh in 1985 and for
Windows 2.0 in 1987), a new generation of spreadsheets was born. Due to the lack of a patent (which until then had never been issued for a computer program), none of the developers of the VisiCalc clones had to pay any royalties to
VisiCorp.
The idea was prominent enough that a spreadsheet program was shipped as
C source code as a programming example of
Borland's
Turbo C compiler: the TurboCalc.
Reception
Antic (magazine) reviewer Joseph Kattan writes "VisiCalc isn't as easy to use as prepackaged home accounting programs, because you're required to design both the layout and the formulas used by the program. Because it is not pre-packaged, however, it's infinitely more powerful and flexible than such programs. You can use VisiCalc to balance your checkbook, keep track of credit card purchases, calculate your net worth, do your taxes - the possibilities are practically limitless."
See also
