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Killer app
My brother was in town recently for New York Comic Con (part of his job) at the Javits Center. We got to catch up, even if it was too brief.
This brought to mind however, another convention — I wasn’t there, but I have read about it, as you shall see — 47 years ago, in an atmosphere described contemporaneously as “big … crowded .. and not entirely pleasant.”
This was when the co-creators of VisiCalc—the first spreadsheet program designed for a personal computer—unveiled their creation to the world.
This was a really big moment, in retrospect. Sure, VisiCalc is at least three or four spreadsheets du jour ago. Sure, half of my readers will have no idea what it was.
But here’s what Michael Bragitikos of The Wall Street Journal had to say about it in December 1996, a little over equidistant ago:
For the personal computer, the first killer app was a program called VisiCalc.
It was the first electronic spreadsheet, and suddenly legions of business-school graduates, accountants, and others who pushed numbers around for a living for the first time had a reason to own a PC.
VisiCalc only worked on the Apple II at first, and Steve Jobs later credited it with being one of the key things that made that computer a success.
If there had been no VisiCalc, there might well not have been an Apple II.
Then, no Macintosh, no iPhone, no MacBook Air (on which I’m writing this at the moment). No Toy Story or Pixar, for that matter.
No “here watch your iPad” in the back seat on long car drives with kids. We’d all be back to counting out-of-state license plates.
Back ti VisiCalc. Getting there required the work of a 1970s Harvard Business School student named Dan Bricklin, who had an epiphany in the middle of class.
One of his professors was trying to explain a financial calculation on a blackboard. Every time the professor adjusted an input to make a point—change 10% to 12%, for example—he had to manually recalculate every other equation.
It took forever. But, Bricklin had been a programmer before business school.
And as he sat in class, “daydreaming” as he later put it, he got the idea for an electronic spreadsheet—something that seems obvious now, but which was radical for its day.
It was so radical, in fact, that Bricklin had to come up with the idea of using letters to refer to columns, and numbers to refer to rows, just to keep the calculations straight.
Even if you don’t use spreadsheets often, I’ll bet that when I show you this grid, you can pretty quickly tell me what value is in cell B3:
That was all new. Here’s what Bricklin’s reference sheet looked like, as he was trying to work through the user experience:
In fact, when Bricklin had a completed product worthy of a demo, and he and his cofounder unveiled it at the National Computer Conference in 1979, they had to explain three things to a skeptical audience:
What is a spreadsheet?
Why does it have to run on a personal computer?
What is a personal computer?
I guess we can let Jobs explain those last questions. Until VisiCalc, computers were seen as the domain of hobbyists, but with VisiCalc, there was now a business case.
And in 1979, the Apple II was the only personal computer powerful enough to handle VisiCalc. As Jobs put it:
VisiCalc. [T]hat’s what really … propelled the Apple to the success it achieved more than any other single event. … The Apple II could hold up to 48 kilobytes of memory, which today doesn’t seem like much, but at that time was maybe three times as much as its competitors.
And that’s why VisiCalc was written for the Apple II. It was the only computer that could hold it.
Contemporary news stories talk about businesspeople going to computer stores to buy the groundbreaking $100 VisiCalc program, and then buying the Apple II for $2,500, almost as an afterthought.
It was a success, for a short while. More than a million copies of VisiCalc were sold between 1979 and 1983.
But then a former employee launched a spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3, which ran better on IBM’s new computers. Of course, eventually VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 were both ultimately overcome by Microsoft Excel, and Google Sheets.
Now people just open up ChatGPT and say: “Create a spreadsheet that does X, Y, and Z.” (Then, they get frustrated when it transposes Z and Y.)
Anyway, raise a glass to the killer app, without which it’s hard to calculate what life would be like today.
“If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer,” Steve Jobs told his interviewer in 1990, “you’d be interviewing somebody else.”
Other things worth knowing …
WSJ: Iran is fortifying its defenses, rallying loyalists, and threatening a wider, harsher response against the U.S. and its Gulf allies. Satellite images show Iran strengthening sensitive locations including nuclear sites and border areas. The government is also preparing Iranians for renewed war, sending paramilitary forces to read war stories to kindergartners, advertising training in firing shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles, and holding rallies. The belligerent tone also serves as a distraction from the deepening economic misery.
AP: A significant majority of Americans now think Donald Trump is profiting off the presidency in unethical or illegal ways, a new AP-NORC poll finds. About 6 in 10 U.S. adults believe he is either illegally profiting or doing something unethical but not illegal. Only about 2 in 10 think he is doing nothing wrong.
CNBC: U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle said Tuesday she would resign, shortly after new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia said Guilfoyle was being asked to leave her post. Guilfoyle broadly denied “recent allegations” against her, apparently referring to multiple critical articles in the Wall Street Journal about her conduct before and after becoming an ambassador.
KHOU: In a horrifying scene witnessed by dozens of park-goers, a man died after being ejected from a car on the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia on Monday. One witness said the falling man was captured on their souvenir picture taken while on the ride. In a statement, Six Flags said they were “deeply saddened by the guest incident.”
USA Today: A 1988 video-era privacy law will collide with the modern digital age at the Supreme Court today. The Video Privacy Protection Act was enacted in response to the Washington City Paper’s release of a list of 146 movies rented by Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. The legal debate now centers on whether it’s illegal for sites like 247Sports.com to share information about what sports videos people watch with third parties like Meta or Alphabet for ad-targeting purposes.
NYT: These California boat dwellers fear the worst: life on land. For decades, dozens of people lived rent-free on a bay just north of San Francisco. A few holdouts remained as a deadline loomed to leave the water.
Business Insider via AOL: Smoking cigarettes is on the rise among AI researchers, according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. Reason: they’re taking up smoking as a sign to colleagues of how vehemently they believe in the power of artificial intelligence. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I’m showing you my chips are all in,” Sankar said, describing the thought process.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash. Today’s edition was Lower Power Mode, and if you knew that already, I love you. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
I’m old enough and long enough in the computer industry to not only have used VisiCalc (on a DOS pc) but also used “Dan Bricklin Demo” to mock up PC software applications while selling custom software (by taking screen shot of DOS screen and grabbing and moving blocks of pixels around). He was a true pioneer in the early days of the industry.
In the early 1980’s I was a recent Academy grad and worked in an Air Force program office. I built my first computer from scratch in 1978 from a literal bag of parts, so when I found out that the finance department had VisiCalc on a Z-100 (which was then running DOS, I jumped at the chance to use it (not many did). Dan was a true pioneer in the nascent PC age!