Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Software

40 Years Later, Lessons From the Rise and Quick Decline of the First 'Killer App' (wsj.com) 77

It was the first killer app, the spark for Apple's early success and a trigger for the broader PC boom that vaulted Microsoft to its central position in business computing. And within a few years, it was tech-industry roadkill. From a report: The story of VisiCalc, a humble spreadsheet program that set the tech world ablaze 40 years ago, has reverberated through the industry and still influences the decisions of executives, engineers and investors. Its lessons include the power of simplicity and the difficulty of building a hypergrowth company in a hypergrowth industry. Indeed, its lessons have been so internalized by today's tech titans that they have significantly inoculated themselves against that sort of tumultuous, competitive dynamism -- aka disruption.

VisiCalc was unveiled on June 4, 1979, and shipped that October. Dan Bricklin first dreamed it up in a classroom at Harvard Business School -- the room now bears a plaque commemorating his idea -- and partnered with Bob Frankston, who coded VisiCalc and collaborated in its design. When users opened VisiCalc, they would see a character-based grid where numbers or text could be manipulated. It was handy for budgeting, financial projections, bookkeeping and making lists. Today it's instantly recognizable as a spreadsheet, as familiar to us as a blinking cursor, but at the time it was a novel idea that had to be experienced to be understood. Initially VisiCalc ran only on the Apple II, a then-revolutionary new personal computer and Apple's first major consumer product. While some Apple II models had just 4 kilobytes of RAM, VisiCalc demanded a whopping 32KB. (Even the cheapest of today's iPhones have tens of thousands of times as much RAM.)
Further reading: VisiCalc Turns 25, Creators Interviewed (June, 2004).
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

40 Years Later, Lessons From the Rise and Quick Decline of the First 'Killer App'

Comments Filter:
  • That the editors don't?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @02:51PM (#58941336)

    Dad brought home a TRS-80 just to run VisiCalc. That same week there was a Basic programming book at the school book fair.

    Even at age 5, my software ambition immediately led me into memory issues. Little did I know that's what I'd be spending a good decade of my adulthood doing.

    It was awesome watching the home garages of Northern California swap hot-rod, automobile culture for micro computer culture. I remember very vividly being able to ride my BMX around the neighborhood and see Altairs, Apple IIs and- oh wow a Vic 20. And the Dads would show you a little bit of something on each.

    There's lots of things to love about our everyone-owns-a-mobile-device-that-runs-javascript world, but I can't help but think something went terribly wrong. I dunno. Get off my lawn.

    • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @03:06PM (#58941420)

      Something did go terribly wrong. The fact that here on Slashdot, the editors feel the need to tell us things that we already know.

      While some Apple II models had just 4 kilobytes of RAM, VisiCalc demanded a whopping 32KB. Even the cheapest of today's iPhones have tens of thousands of times as much RAM.

      We're not idiots, msmash. We know the difference between 32KB, 32MB and 32GB.

  • by mangastudent ( 718064 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @02:57PM (#58941366)
    Software Arts' deal with its distributor VisiCorp gave them an insane and unsustainable royalty rate, according to Wikipedia 36-50%. Software Arts refused to renegotiate the deal, and VisiCorp in return applied pressure using the contract's terms to make them port it to every possible PC in existence. So they were distracted and wasting resources fighting each other while the industry marched on. I can't count the number of people and companies that created VisiCalc clones for all sorts of systems, with Lotus becoming the big next generation winner.
    • I hope the drain of the legal battles and power of distractions to derail a project is the lesson internalized from most companies...

      I don't know at this point how many companies are even thinking or looking that far back though. It seems unlikely.

    • Yeah

      Dan Bricklin first dreamed it up in a classroom at Harvard Business School...

      I think I can see why it ultimately failed.

    • insane and unsustainable royalty rate, according to Wikipedia 36-50%

      You know, 30% is considered "standard" nowadays, if you ask the likes of Apple and Valve. On consoles it can be all over the place, I recall Microsoft used to take 50% for games sold through Xbox Live Arcade. (Or at least through one of their related publishing programs? I don't know, I never had an Xbox.)

      • insane and unsustainable royalty rate, according to Wikipedia 36-50%

        You know, 30% is considered "standard" nowadays, if you ask the likes of Apple and Valve.

        That's more than sustainable for a publisher who can primarily market on the Web, do fulfillment using a website and it and email for primary communications with users or their custom app, and send the software's bits over the Internet.

        In the bad old days, fulfillment was vastly more expensive, multiple physical SKUs (for example, Apple II and TRS-80)

  • I could probably do everything I need to do at home on VisiCalc today or Broderbund Spreadsheet. But this version as Java or Flash or runs on Windoze ASDF or blah blah blah. Keeping up with technology is futile.
    • by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @06:11PM (#58942438) Journal

      My dad actually used VisiCalc to create spreadsheets for calculating feed ratios for hundreds of cattle at a dairy operation. He could tweak some numbers here and there, recalculate, and then bang out a copy on paper to put on a clipboard for the guys who would be dumping yards of ingredients into a mixing truck in order to get the nutrition right.

      Beats the hell out of using an adding machine, or whatever was done before.

  • Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @03:19PM (#58941504) Journal
    Its lessons include the power of simplicity and the difficulty of building a hypergrowth company in a hypergrowth industry.

    The power of simplicity? I can't see how that is relevant today. It certainly doesn't influence any decision maker I know of. Today it's all about making things as convoluted as possible by shoving in every bell, whistle, nut, and bolt. Forget about opening a piece of software in a second and using it. Now it's all about signing in, waiting for background data transfers, synchronization, and finally system stabilization.

    As for the hypergrowth portion, that is in play. In fact, that seems to be the only thing in play. How fast can one grow to burn through at least $1 billion yet claim you're producing something?

    Like everything else, because VisiCalc was usable, it had to be killed. Just like the most perfect word processing program, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Nothing compares to the speed and ease of use of that program, and never will. Why? Because simplicity is no longer something to aspire to.
    • Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @04:59PM (#58941996)
      I'll take the bells and whistles, where appropriate, thank you. Calc, Notepad, Paint, things like that open instantly and their limited function is extremely appreciated. When I open Excel, it takes a bit and it occasionally asks me to authenticate. For that price I can edit any excel file stored on my OneDrive or on Teams, which is extremely appreciated also. I guess it's all in how you define "simplicity": simple application, or simple process. If the requirement is to co-edit a document you either get a simple application and a tedious business process or a complicated application and a simple business process.
    • "WordPerfect" was a laughable misnomer for that pile of shit. There was no ease of use, but rote memorization of row upon row of arcane keyboard shortcuts. Your layout would change every time you switched printers. It wasn't WYSIWYG so your layout would be guesswork and lots of iteration. The vaunted 'code view' was not a feature, but a necessity for troubleshooting because WP would place formatting codes willy-nilly and screw up your document.

      MS Word 1.0 put it into the ground, and for good reason: it was

      • "WordPerfect" was a laughable misnomer for that pile of shit. There was no ease of use, but rote memorization of row upon row of arcane keyboard shortcuts.

        So, you are saying it was EMACS...

        • "WordPerfect" was a laughable misnomer for that pile of shit. There was no ease of use, but rote memorization of row upon row of arcane keyboard shortcuts.

          So, you are saying it was EMACS...

          No, vi.

    • Just like the most perfect word processing program, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Nothing compares to the speed and ease of use of that program, and never will.

      Not true.

      For very simple things that stay local, I use pencil and paper or if I don't have it, the note-taker tool on my phone.

      For things slightly more complex I use the bare-bones text editor of whatever computer or device I have handy. They are fast, they allow me to fix typos, do cut-and-paste within the document and to email or other places, and if the device supports it, print.

      It's only when I need things like tabs, bold, etc. that I might step up to the next level. Heck, on some platforms, the bare-

  • by crgrace ( 220738 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @03:26PM (#58941540)

    VisiCalc killed itself long before Excel showed up on the scene. Basically, the owners of the company decided to invest in a GUI system called VisiOn to replay MSDOS. Oops. The story is fascinating.

    https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-and-its-discontents/ [filfre.net]

    • And don't forget that Lotus 1-2-3 was the intermediate king of the spreadsheet hill.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I just object to the lead-in, which is suggestive of a 'flash in the pan' story.

      - Killer Apps became something of a mythical unicorn thing, but not necessarily in a bad way. People understood that the purpose was to snag a customer for the computer on the first application. Once they had the computer, more applications would follow;
      - Although VisiCalc died, it begat Lotus 1-2-3, Multiplan, Quattro, Excel, and a thousand others. The entire spreadsheet category is indispensable today. There are multiple g

  • It may be paywalled but that's never stopped /. before...

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/4... [wsj.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Use private browsing or purge your cookies and private data before visiting the link.

    At least for now the WSJ is letting you have at least one free article to read.

    It wouldn't surprise me if this article goes behind the "never free" paywall soon.

  • Holy jebus, 4kB must have hurt bad. I was going to say that I've never seen an Apple 2 series machine with less than 64kB, but I've seen an actual Apple ][ (once) so it couldn't have had any more than 48kB. Looking at the numbers [stackexchange.com], it seems like virtually all Apple 2s had at least 16kB (the least configuration for the ][+).

    • My VIC-20 had 3.5KB RAM available, out of 5KB, after the OS took 1.5KB for startup. After paying $300 bucks I didn't have enough money to buy a 1540 disk drive nor a 1530 Datasette, so I bought a 3rd party cassette tape adapter and connected to my own tape recorder to store files. When I'd saved enough to buy a 3KB RAM expansion module it was like a dream: I doubled my memory - heh heh heh.

      Oh the memories. I wish I hadn't donated all that old equipment when I made a cross country move, it would be fun to
    • The original Apple ][ computers were available with 4KB RAM on the motherboard configurable up to 48KB. You could make the jump from 48KB to 64KB by adding the 16K Language Card (part number A2S2128x), which also came with a new ROM allowing the system to boot from floppy disks.
  • Even the cheapest of today's iPhones have tens of thousands of times as much RAM.

    Cheapest iPhones? Oh, so you're saying an overpriced phone has a lot more RAM? Interesting.

    • Even the cheapest of today's iPhones have tens of thousands of times as much RAM.

      Cheapest iPhones? Oh, so you're saying an overpriced phone has a lot more RAM? Interesting.

      They should have said "entry level". The words "cheap" and "iPhone" (or any Apple product) do not belong in the same sentence.

You are always doing something marginal when the boss drops by your desk.

Working...