
Computing's first 'killer app' changed everything - ColinWright
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47802280
======
hirundo
When I saw the "first killer app" headline I immediately thought "VisiCalc". I
used it ad-nauseum on a TRS-80 III as a neuroscience lab assistant in the
early '80s. Before I got that software I used actual paper spreadsheets,
either big 17"x11" sheets, or painfully self ruled paper. After enough hours
of that I carried my TRS-80 into the lab and introduced my professor to it and
VisiCalc, who fell in love and bought one for the lab.

If you've never spreadsheeted on paper you may not realize the glory of even
the most primitive spreadsheet app. I used to use erasers until my fingers
went numb or white-out by the quart.

Up hill both ways. You young whippersnappers have no idea how good you have
it.

I sat with the prof to show him my first attempt, with a half dozen formulas
in it. He looked over my shoulder and showed me that every. fucking. formula.
was wrong. I felt humiliated. But we fixed them as we went, and watching the
changes flow into the cells was magic. My force had been multiplied.

The skills from VisiCalc have transferred to other spreadsheets over the years
very well. It's amazing how much Mr. Bricklin got right. I wonder how much was
his brilliance and how much was the inevitability of the design.

~~~
jhayward
Bricklin didn't invent spreadsheets, they had existed for hundreds of years.
He wasn't even the first to use a digital computer to implement one. He was,
however, in the right place at the right time to put spreadsheets in the hands
of many more people in a much more convenient and powerful form.

See:
[http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html](http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html)

~~~
adventured
Bricklin invented the software spreadsheet. It's only a need to debase
Bricklin's obvious credit, that leads to the claim that comparable
spreadsheets existed prior to VisiCalc. They did not. That's precisely why it
was such a marvel.

Whatever existed prior to VisiCalc, was _not_ similar to the spreadsheet as we
know it and define it today. It's a path that VisiCalc blazed, to universal
credit by everyone that was in the industry at the time and helped pioneer
software.

~~~
jhayward
What, specifically, are you asserting that Bricklin invented?

It wasn't the visual paradigm of a tabular presentation. It wasn't the two-
formed concept of cells having both values and formulas, or that the formulas
could be stated in terms of other cell's values.

It wasn't that you could do what accountants had done for centuries using the
same tools. It wasn't that the same type of calculations could be done using a
computer.

So what we're left is that he took a visual concept and implemented it on a
screen. I don't think that qualifies as "invention", myself. It is re-
implementation, copying, or something that doesn't involve a conceptual leap.

He was in the right place at the right time to spot the technological
opportunity, and we are all better for that.

------
freedomben
In many fields, spreadsheet apps still _are_ the killer app(s). I worked at a
company that made tax software, and to this day Excel is still a mandatory
skill for an accountant, despite the "advanced" software we have these days.
In project management in many industries as well the data is largely
spreadsheet driven.

Couple that with the fact that you can literally use a Google Sheet as the
database backend for small apps, and I think it's a good case that
spreadsheets are still killer.

~~~
sverige
It's popular to make fun of Excel in some circles, but it really is a nearly
perfect tool for innumerable real-world business tasks. It's intuitive enough
that newcomers can do some work with minimal instruction, and powerful enough
that you can manage a half-billion dollar book of business with it.

More than any of the iterations of Windows, Excel is Microsoft's great
contribution to software, and I say that as an old-school MS hater.

I think people too often forget that "useful" is the key ingredient in killer
software.

~~~
netsharc
Another view is that spreadsheet software is the first user-friendly way to
create computer programs almost anyone can do: you have input, algorithms you
define, and output.

------
bobbiechen
I saw a guest lecture in my HCI class at CMU this semester from Dan Bricklin
[1], who demoed VisiCalc for us on an emulator [2]. One thing that really
struck me was how similar the interface was to today's Excel or Google Sheets.
He even demonstrated how a lot of the original shortcuts still worked in
Excel.

Another fun bit of his talk, about the max digits in VisiCalc:

 _The number of digits that we stored for precision, it was stored as binary-
coded decimal, just like a calculator, it was not stored as a binary number.
It was stored as the digits, so that it would be exactly the same that you
would see on your calculator, without funny round-off errors and stuff like
that.

But we had to figure out what the maximum number of digits would be. And we
decided, let’s - ha-ha. We thought, here us, two little programmers trying to
figure out if anyone would use it. Let’s take the budget of the United States
of America, in dollars. That’s the maximum, at the time. So that’s the maximum
number of digits we had. Sure enough, within a few years, people were using
it, according to the Wall Street Journal, for calculating the budget of the
United States of America, but only in dollars, not in pennies, because that’s
all it could do without going to scientific notation._

[1]
[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=d129250d-7c28-45f5-874b-a9fa01542afb)

[2]
[https://www.pcjs.org/apps/pcx86/1981/visicalc/](https://www.pcjs.org/apps/pcx86/1981/visicalc/)

[3]
[http://www.notetakerhd.com/about.html](http://www.notetakerhd.com/about.html)

~~~
gumby
> One thing that really struck me was how similar the interface was to today's
> Excel or Google Sheets.

UIs typically recapitulate neoteny: from the beginning, competitive
spreadsheets needed to be UI-compatible with Visicalc (even today Excel
accepts most Visicalc controls, and has, I have been told by Frankston+,
VisiCalc-compatible bugs). Notably, spreadsheets or spreadsheet-like
interfaces that don't confirm people's assumptions struggle in the market
(e.g. Apple Numbers).

\+ Bob Frankston who was the implementor of Visicalc, and later worked at
Microsoft, though not on Excel. You can thank him that Windows had TCP rather
than some proprietary system...for the same path-dependency / network reasons.

------
fouc
The article briefly mentions:

>the Jennifer Unit, an earpiece that directs warehouse pickers to collect
products by breaking down instructions into the most mindless, idiot-proof
steps.

That makes me think of the story of Manna, which predicted something like
this.
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

~~~
Lowkeyloki
That's exactly what I thought of. I thought, dear god, it's real. I really
hope someone didn't read Manna and think, gee, that sounds like a good idea!

I have to disagree with Marshall Brain's "solution" to the problem. When I
read those final chapters, I couldn't help but think the Vertebrane system was
subtly and insidiously even worse than Manna.

~~~
anchpop
I just read it, it's a great story. I can see some obvious drawbacks to
Vertebrane (I like my privacy), but I can't imagine it being worse than Manna.

~~~
Lowkeyloki
Privacy was my first concern about it, too. Okay, so maybe not worse than
Manna, but at least as bad as, if in a different way.

------
RachelF
Also note the inventors of VisiCalc failed to patent it for various
reasons[1]. This led to quick improvements of the spreadsheet by Lotus,
Borland and Microsoft. If it had been patented, it is unlikely innovation
would have been so fast with VisiCalc having a monopoly.

[1]
[http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm](http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm)

------
Theodores
The lessons from this article are many, the 400,000 jobs lost book-keeping vs.
600,000 jobs gained accounting is a figure worth remembering if you are trying
to get some automation introduced somewhere.

There are parallels in many areas of customer service for instance. Anywhere
where you can do a better job of helping the customer with knowledgeable staff
that don't have to be doing so much mundane stuff.

~~~
RachelF
True, but the figures can be misleading. The US economy is probably 4x the
size it was in 1978, so without these productivity advances we'd need 4x as
many book-keepers and accountants.

Whether the economy could have grown to 4x the size without productivity
advances like spreadsheets is a related question.

~~~
mhh__
Almost 9x by GDP

------
dontbenebby
The title's use of quotes made me think it was going to be an article on the
Therac-25 incident, whose software was arguably the true first "killer" app
and is used as a cautionary tale in every intro level human computer
interaction course

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

------
dalbasal
Accountants are surprisingly avante garde technologists.

Sumerian accountants seem to have invented cuineform, which evolved into the
(AFAIK) earliest widespread writing system. Italian accountants (including
Fibonacci's dad) first adopted Indo–Arabic numerals, because they made
ledgering easier than roman numerals.. and opened the door to arab mathematics
systems like algebra

------
Causality1
Electronic spreadsheets seem like such an obvious advantage of early personal
computers that it's a bit surprising they weren't expressly designed with that
in mind. I think their rise should serve as a reminder that building flexible
systems gives people the ability to use your systems in amazing ways you never
envisioned.

------
credit_guy
Whenever someone claims that robots will destroy our jobs, I point them to
spreadsheets. How many people in the world were using physical spreadsheets
before the advent of their software cousins? Ten thousand? How many people use
Excel today? Hundreds of millions? Spreadsheet software has increased the
number of spreadsheet workers by many orders of magnitude. It's a very extreme
example, and not all automation will be the same story, but it's not all doom
and gloom

~~~
chungleong
The lump of labor fallacy get pushed by journalists because it's actually
operative in their field. Technological advances were not accompanied by
demand for higher quality. If anything the lump has arguably gotten smaller.

------
nraynaud
I would like a (pseudo-)mode that color code the cells depending on the format
they are in. And tools to easily change said format (let’s call it type). And
probably use text by default.

------
kevin_thibedeau
Bank ATMs were the first computing killer app, allowing people access to cash
outside normal banking hours.

~~~
Tor3
I don't think ATMs appeared equally early everywhere, but in any case, 'killer
app' in this context points to the fact that the Visical application made
businesses go out and buy Apple II computers, just so they could run Visicalc.
They didn't, before Visicalc. That little piece of software made the sales of
Apple II explode and laid the fundament for having something like the IBM PC
in the office. ATMs were very useful for people, but it didn't create a
fundamental change in the use of computers.

------
GrumpyNl
Supercalc got me starting my career as a software developer.

------
simonsays2
First killer app was calculating trajectories for artillery.

~~~
tomcam
That was my dad, in WWII. He was the only one in his unit who could do the
math. He kept going AWOL but they couldn’t do more than bring him back down to
private because no one else could do the trig.

