
VisiCalc's Spreadsheets Changed the World - eaguyhn
https://thenewstack.io/how-visicalcs-spreadsheets-changed-the-world/
======
notacoward
Nice to see VisiCalc getting some recognition. A lot of people seem to credit
Lotus 1-2-3 as the original spreadsheet, but people had already been buying
Apple computers primarily to run VisiCalc for _four years_ when 1-2-3 came
out. It's hard to appreciate, looking back, what a mind-blowing thing it was
to make changes in one part of a spreadsheet and have the other parts
automatically update, and for this capability to be in the hands of _ordinary
people_ instead of specialists (or those who could afford to hire
specialists). No programming required. Suddenly, a whole lot of people could
do a kind of modeling and projection that had been out of reach before.
"Killer app" definitely applies.

~~~
amrrs
I felt ashamed that throughout my career I never got to know Visicalc. I
recently read 'The innovators' and got to know from it. It's good that some
authors putting effort in researching better to attribute the credits in the
right way.

~~~
jhoechtl
My introduction to spreadsheet applications was through SuperCalc. Didn't hear
of Visicalc until recently.

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tunesmith
Man, I remember my Dad excitedly showing me Visicalc on our Apple II when he
came home from working at Kodak. He _loved_ it and I remember playing with it
a bunch as well. There's something pretty magical about it.

And I still think there's room for innovation. Not something cloud-based, but
something that lies in the middle between a classic spreadsheet, and other
concepts like Jupyter or the Mac's "Calca" app.

What I don't like about spreadsheets is that you can't document them, like
literate explanations about what the calculation is or why. You can do that in
Jupyter documents, but bringing in reactive calculations to Jupyter is still a
very hacky affair, akin to invoking "recompile entire document" after every
adjustment.

If I could have something that was _more_ like a spreadsheet, meaning reactive
calculations as a first class concept, but still one step away from the grid
UI with room for documentation and explanation, I'd be very happy. Literate
Spreadsheets, basically.

~~~
snaily
I believe mbostock's [https://observablehq.com/](https://observablehq.com/) is
trying to do that

A guide was linked the other day:
[https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-
javas...](https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javascript)

~~~
tunesmith
This is encouraging and I will try it out for some purposes, but without the
ability to run it privately and offline, it means there are some documents and
data I'd never use it for.

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miki123211
I think spreatsheets (nowadays Excel and Google Docs) are a much
underappreciated tool. I neither fully appreciate nor fully understand them
myself, but I'm starting to see the potential. Accountants and other business
people already know them well, but I don't think the average HN user realizes
what they could do with them, even for personal use. I think they're useful
for all things of tracking, from to do lists to even recording time spend.
Combine that with some simple scripts that work with csv, and you have a
powerful setup with little programming.

~~~
kstrauser
Whatever you (justifiably) think of the guy, Martin Shkreli is insanely good
with Excel. He uploaded quite a few videos of himself doing stock analysis.
For example:
[https://youtu.be/jFSf5YhYQbw?t=211](https://youtu.be/jFSf5YhYQbw?t=211)

I have a few decades of experience writing software, but I still aspire to one
day be as good with my tools as he is with his.

~~~
llao
I skipped through it and the only impressive stuff I saw is his APM with
clicking, copying and reformatting. I also saw him copy and paste whole
columns of values and then manually replacing some with new values, which is
super error-prone. What should look at to understand your impressions?

~~~
thedudeabides5
Well, maybe what’s he’s doing isn’t just moving data around and copying
formatting.

Maybe try answering a similar question using code and see how easy it is

~~~
llao
If it is more than that, and you sound very sure of it, _please_ show me. I am
honestly interested.

------
dang
Some older threads on VisiCalc:

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587048)

2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830686)

2008
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176783)

~~~
hirundo
last month
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19980548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19980548)

~~~
dang
Thanks! I almost added that I'm sure there have been others.

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cek
I got my first computer (Apple ][+) by conning my dad into thinking he needed
VisiCalc.

The rest is, as they say, history.

------
paulfitz
You can download VisiCalc from Dan Bricklin's site at
[http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm](http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm)
and run it using dosbox. Tip: a formula is something like "+A1" instead of
"=A1".

~~~
bobbiechen
There's also this online emulator from PCjs:
[https://www.pcjs.org/apps/pcx86/1981/visicalc/](https://www.pcjs.org/apps/pcx86/1981/visicalc/)

You can see some behavior differences compared to modern spreadsheets,
notably: there's no operator precedence in VisiCalc. 1 + 2 * 3 = 9 (instead of
7), because this imitated the behavior of simple calculators. Bricklin
realized VisiCalc was competing against people with paper and calculators, and
anything that made it harder or slower than that would hurt adoption.

~~~
paulfitz
Neat! Looks like that site also has Lotus 1-2-3
[https://www.pcjs.org/disks/pcx86/apps/lotus/123/1as/](https://www.pcjs.org/disks/pcx86/apps/lotus/123/1as/)

------
janci
Things I miss in modern spreadsheets:

    
    
      - Formula references (to be used as function references)
      - Formatting formulas (directly in formula section, not via conditional formatting)
      - Format-querying functions (as isBold, cellFontFamily, textcolor)
      - better non-macro controls
      - in-cell controls (instead of floating control objects)
      - dynamic ranges (ie. you can paste any number of input values and all connected ranges will expand to the needed size)
      - better external data handling
      - serialization formats native support (json, xml) - no more error prone string pseudoparsing and manual concatenation without proper escaping
      - HTTP(S) client for executing API calls from formulas
      - (above requires selective manual re-evaluation instead full-auto/all-manual options we have)

------
wolco
I have an original copy. The best is the leather so thick and such great
quality. Now we are lucky to get a plastic thin case.

------
asdfman123
Planet money has a great podcast about this that goes into more depth:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episode-606-spreadsheets)

I think that a lot of the efficiency gains and economic growth that computers
introduced are from spreadsheets. Where would business be today without them?

------
ghaff
I sometimes wonder if the spreadsheet (or really the modern office suite with
word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation maker) form was more or less
inevitable given how desktop/laptop functionality evolved. And how much they
influenced each other.

Obviously, these aren't the only programs that people use but individual bells
and whistles aside, all the products in this space looked more alike than
different by the early- to mid-80s. Even the advent of Windows didn't really
change the basic model all that much.

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pstuart
I worked at Arthur Anderson around this time, and when Lotus 1-2-3 came out it
was like accountant crack -- they could start building complicated models and
optimize for return value.

While efficiency is normally considered good, I think that this set the stage
to reduce human activity to a couple of cells on a spreadsheet that can be
easily deleted to bump up the numbers. It's the equivalent of killing people
by high-altitude bombing -- they're not people anymore, and the only concern
is "yield".

~~~
dv_dt
I can't help thinking whenever I see a "be wary the coming automation/AI"
article, that they missed the root cause and disruption by decades, as
spreadsheets were the fundamental abstraction & automation advance needed
apply algorithms economically with less and less regard to impacts on
individual humans.

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mlukaszek
To me, its a real shame he's not making more money from this, as they don't
hold a patent because because at the time of invention (1979) it just wasn't
common for software to be patented. He would be crazy rich otherwise.
[http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm](http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm)

~~~
kstrauser
Thank god. Can you imagine how far behind our current technology we would be
if people had patented fundamental concepts in computer? That would have been
financially ruinous.

------
anderspitman
I recently enjoyed Rich Harris' talk "Rethinking Reactivity"[0]. He nicely
ties spreadsheets into the current trend in "reactive programming".

[0] [https://youtu.be/AdNJ3fydeao](https://youtu.be/AdNJ3fydeao)

------
dvdhsu
VisiCalc is really cool. I think it was probably the earliest "killer app" —
you would buy a computer literally to use VisiCalc.

As an engineer... I've always struggled with understanding spreadsheets. To
me, it always seemed that writing code was strictly better. For example, as
somebody mentions further down the thread, spreadsheets don't a) connect to
external datasources easily, b) are very limited in terms of their UI (cells
only!), and c) are impossible to manage, version control, and distribute.

It's why I started working on a project called Retool
([https://tryretool.com](https://tryretool.com)). It's basically Excel, but
every cell is a React component. And we don't store any data ourselves — we
connect to whatever datasource you want to connect to — whether a database
(postgres, mysql, etc.), or a HTTP / REST API (stripe, salesforce, etc.). And
it's hosted by us on the cloud (or by you, in your own AWS), so distribution
is easy: we handle deployments, authentication, authorization, etc. for you.

The goal is to let developers build a certain class of software really fast
(for us, custom internal applications). Most internal applications are
incredibly boring (tables, textinputs, buttons, etc.), and all do similar
things (CRUD, basically).

It looks like there are a lot of hardcore spreadsheet users + engineers
here... if you guys have any feedback, that'd be really appreciated. We just
got started, and are looking for literally any feedback :). Thanks!

~~~
bitwize
I'm not an engineer, but my father was -- a mechanical engineer -- and back in
the 80s if you put a spreadsheet in front of him he wouldn't know what to do
with it. Maybe some basic home finance stuff. He took to BASIC, though, and
that became his MATLAB. He used it to run calculations and physical
simulations and plot charts, it was awesome. All with 1-2 years of mainly
self-teaching. There do seem to be technical people (not necessarily in
software) for whom code > spreadsheets, but finance people take to Excel like
ducks to water.

