
VisiCalc - afhammad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
======
agumonkey
32k people. 32k.

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beagle3
Note that's the TOTAL ram required to run it - I'd assume most of it was
actually taken by spreadsheet data.

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agumonkey
I don't know what to think of this then "Bricklin and Frankston's original
intention was to fit the program into 16k". To me it means the program binary
couldn't fit in 16k, so I'd assume the code was between 16k and 32k. Supposing
the largest manageable spreadsheet being 26 cols * 1K rows, filled with 2
bytes, that's ~5kB of user data.

Anyway, if they managed to write a useful spreadsheet in 20kB it's even
better.

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beagle3
Note this: "However, Apple eventually began shipping all Apple IIs with 48k
following a drop in RAM prices and so this was no longer an issue. "

The 16k/32k/48k that apple shipped was the total ram in the machine. VisiCalc
had to fit there to - no swapping/overlay was employed.

26(cols) _1K(rows)_ 2(bytes) is already 52KB. They were obviously storing
things more sparsely than that - I think it was 100 rows or even less (which,
at 2 bytes/cell would be in line with your 5K estimate).

However, 2 bytes is not enough for floating point values, and cells could also
contain text. Whatever it was, it was more complicated than the simplest
array, though probably not by much.

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agumonkey
__off by ten shame __

The following articles says 27kb, and 63 columns and 254 rows limits.

[http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1681443,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1681443,00.asp)

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kyberias
Yes, that is the Wikipedia page for a spreadsheet application called Visicalc.

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edgarvm
And yes, it's still available to download
[http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm](http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm)

