VisiCalc Turns 25, Creators Interviewed 149
Xaroth writes "It's hard to believe that it's already been 25 years since the release of one of the world's first 'killer apps.' 1979 saw the creation of VisiCalc, the first microcomputer-based spreadsheet and the single application that launched widespread computer use among businesses.
To remember this event, PC World has published portions of interviews with the three co-creators of the modern spreadsheet: Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, and Dan Fylstra. Alternately, check out the Software History website for more information on this and other historical bits."
Test it out! (Score:5, Informative)
I bet there's a Linux one floating around out there, I guess I'll try to WINE this one.
Software History website basically a placeholder (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I can tell, it has absolutely zero content about Visicalc, and I have no idea why it was linked to in the first place.
Dosemu works (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Other Small Fact... (Score:3, Informative)
Visicalc came out in 1979. At that time, software patents were rarely granted. (Our legal system has corrupted patents since that time.) Dan Bricklin has some information about Visicalc and panents on his website.
http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm [bricklin.com]
Re:Ah ... (Score:5, Informative)
Good thing you posted as anonymous coward so that the world will not know just how clueless you really are.
Even difficult problems like the travelling salesman or Towers of Hanoi have been solved and added to the calculation engine. This kind of feature adding essentially reduces the calculation time of these problems to a O(1) table lookup.
WHAT? Start making sense. Towers of Hanoi is a 2^n problem, but it doesn't actually "solve" anything. A look-up table would make absolutely no sense. Do you need a look up table to figure out what a stack of rings looks like on peg 2 as opposed to peg 1? You could make a LUT for "move X", but the problem grows so fast, you can quickly see that just 40 discs would create a LUT that would fill most raid arrays.
The traveling salesman is NP-complete. Transforming it to a problem in P has never been done. The notion of a LUT for this problem is silly. You can only precompute the LUT for one instance of the problem. If you can convert all possible such problems to an O(1) lookup table though, you will have solved the P=NP problem and can claim the US$1million prize.
Because you are probably a sysadmin with a degree from DeVry and don't understand that notation, I'll explain it simply: O(1) means "really fast".
You've never taken computing theory yourself, have you? The next paragraph you write emphasizes that either you didn't, or you slept through the class:
If we consider that a signed 16 bit integer can only handle values between -16k through 16k,
2^15 ~= 32K
it becomes obvious that Visicalc simply couldn't handle the types of calculations that we are performing today
Even back in 1979, computers had the same computational power as a turing machine. They could perform the same calculations as computers today, their only limiting factor is available memory and available time.
(32 bits allows us values of +-2 trillion).
2^31 ~= 2 billion (or if you're one of those UK types, 2 thousand million)
Implementing Visicalc (Score:5, Informative)
Read this website several months ago and it's quite detailed. Maybe more than you wanted to know but it's very detailed and is a good read.
Implementing Visicalc [frankston.com]
Re:They needed databases, too... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They needed databases, too... (Score:3, Informative)
Well over 10 million Apple IIs were manufactured and sold. Remember that "Apple II" as a general term includes Apple II, Apple II plus, Apple IIe, Apple IIc, Apple IIc+, and Apple IIgs machines. On top of that there were millions of clones produced all over the world.
Re:Software History website basically a placeholde (Score:3, Informative)
In May, the Software History Center in Boston reunited veterans of the PC's first decade to reminisce and exchange war stories. The luminaries included the three principals behind VisiCalc: Dan Bricklin, who conceived the idea; Bob Frankston, who programmed VisiCalc; and Dan Fylstra, whose VisiCorp brought the product to a surprised world. Here are edited versions of interviews with all three.
Given that it was the original source of the interviews, it seemed appropriate to mention it in the synopsis.