#45 - Money and Technology - Part I

I'll bet you didn't know that finance (more specifically accounting) was a major driver behind personal computer development. I've seen it written that without the invention of the spreadsheet, PCs as we know them today, would not exist.

And now for the rest of the story. Dan Briklin was a MBA student at Harvard in 1978 when he first had the idea of the electronic spreadsheet. For centuries accountants the world over used huge sheets of paper with columns and rows to organize finances. He teamed up with Bob Frankston in 1979 and formed the Software Arts company. Dan wrote his first electronic spreadsheet on an Apple II in Apple Basic (my first PC!). They named it Visicalc. It was first used at Harvard in graduate classes and it quickly became the hottest software product in the fledgling PC world. After a great reception and some copying, a lawsuit eventually did in Software Arts. Their publisher got in a battle with engineers and no one but the lawyers won. Visicalc was eventually sold to the Lotus Corporation. During the lawsuit Lotus had copied the Visicalc idea and came out with Lotus 1-2-3 Designed for the new IBM PC, Lotus 1-2-3 soon became the #1 software product and drove more sales of PCs then any other reason.

Companies found a way to be more productive and get quicker financial answers. Sales of PCs took off driven by Businesses desire to get a better hand on where there organization was heading. Lotus 1-2-3 was the precursor to Excel and is still available for sale by IBM.

I had Visicalc on my old Apple and then moved on to Lotus 1-2-3 ( I still have a version lying around!). You can still download a free version of Visicalc (Free From IBM) here: http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm. Note that this program is a tiny 25K in size. Way smaller then a typical jpg picture file. Amazing.