
Lessons from the Rise and Quick Decline of First ‘Killer App’ - jkuria
https://www.wsj.com/articles/40-years-later-lessons-from-the-rise-and-quick-decline-of-the-first-killer-app-11562990402?mod=rsswn
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akulkarni
“VisiCalc, meanwhile, was mired in a lawsuit between its creators and its
publishers—software in its early days was distributed under an author-
publisher model, like books.“

It really is incredible how much the software industry has changed over the
years.

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ghaff
I sometimes wonder whether something that looks like a spreadsheet was pretty
much an inevitable invention and major category of office software.

A word processor certainly seems inevitable. And, probably, something that
lets you create content to be projected.

But the spreadsheet? Certainly tabular data was very common in a business
setting but I sometimes wonder if that had to lead to Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3,
and Excel.

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gumby
The literal spreadsheet -- a printed sheet of paper with rows and columns,
with the rows and columns summed at their ends -- was common in business and
taught in business school. Bricklin got his idea in a classroom for a reason.
For my first company, in 1989, our "checkbook" was a literal spreadsheet: when
you (hand) wrote a check, a carbon strip transferred the payeee, amount etc
onto a spreadsheet underneath it.

But like so many things the spreadsheet itself evolved over centuries.

Likewise I used early word processors as a kid in the 1970s and there was
enough variation in how they worked and thought of the buffer that it was
clearly not "obvious". Even emacs and vi, which evolved from command-based
editors (TECO and ed respectively) took opposite approaches (modeless vs
modal) to their fundamental interaction model. And Bravo on the Alto (what you
call Word today), while choosing modeless, took of course a different point on
the interaction plane.

Nothing obvious about it.

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jdsully
Your phrasing implies Word has a shared code base like BSD and Unix do. The
connection of Bravo with Word is that Charles Simonyi was involved with both.
You see that with a lot of Xerox PARC projects - the researches frustrated
with Xerox's failure to commercialize their research went elsewhere to
implement their vision.

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gumby
I don’t think I implied that. Gnu emacs shares not s single line of code with
EMACS but they are both emacs.

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jdsully
That’s just how I read it. I didn’t mean to imply incorrect intent on your
part - I just wanted to be precise for those that may not know the history.

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inlined
I used to follow acquisition prices more closely. I was fascinated that an
acquisition that complimented a company’s efforts closed for orders of
magnitude than an acquisition of a competitor.

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kaycebasques
> an acquisition that complimented a company’s efforts closed for orders of
> magnitude than an acquisition of a competitor

You’re missing a key word here. Orders of magnitude more or less?

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inlined
Less >_<

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Gys
> Remember VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet? Today’s tech giants do,
> and that is why they buy up and invest in potential competitive threats

