Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 151

Fig. 8.11. The 1979 program, VisiCalc, was the first “killer” application for business. It was a spread-
sheet program produced by Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston for their Software Arts company.
Many customers bought an Apple computer specifically to run VisiCalc. Although VisiCalc was the
first spreadsheet for personal computers, it was soon followed by other spreadsheet programs from
Lotus, Microsoft, Borland, and others and eventually lost its supremacy in the market. Bricklin had
not been able to patent the spreadsheet idea in VisiCalc because software patents were not generally
issued until after a groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1981.
student who had seen his fellow MBA students struggle to perform tedious
and error-prone arithmetic operations on rows and columns of financial data.
He conceived of VisiCalc as a program that would automate these spreadsheet
calculations, and with Robert Frankston, who had worked with him on Project
MAC at MIT, he set up a company to develop and market his new VisiCalc appli-
cation. Although Apple was not interested in marketing the program directly,
VisiCalc rapidly became a word-of-mouth success. As Robert Slater says in his
topic Portraits in Silicon :
Suddenly it became obvious to businessmen that they had to have a personal
computer: VisiCalc made it feasible to use one. No prior technical training
was needed to use the spreadsheet program. Once, both hardware and
software were for hobbyists, the personal computer a mysterious toy, used if
anything for playing games. But after VisiCalc the computer was recognized
as a crucial tool. 11
Apple was incorporated in January 1977. When it went public in December
1980, it was one of the most successful stock offerings in Wall Street history
and Jobs and Wozniak became multimillionaires overnight.
Project Chess and the IBM PC
By 1980, IBM had observed the rise of the Apple II and other micropro-
cessor-based computers. A small group of advocates within the company real-
ized that IBM could only become a dominant player in this emerging personal
computer market if it could produce a machine very quickly. According to the
B.8.5. Bob Frankston (left) and Dan Bricklin, pioneers of the VisiCalc spreadsheet. Bricklin
graduated from MIT in 1973 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. After
some years in industry, he signed up for an MBA from Harvard Business School. It was while
Bricklin was sitting in room 108 in Aldrich Hall at Harvard in 1978 that he dreamed of an easier
way to calculate financial projections for multiple different business scenarios: “Imagine if my
calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse. . . .” B1 He wrote a first prototype for the Apple II,
which introduced rows and columns and some arithmetic operations. With fellow MIT graduate
Bob Frankston, Bricklin founded Software Arts, Inc. in 1979 and began selling VisiCalc for $100
a copy. There is a plaque on the wall of Aldrich 108 commemorating Bricklin's achievement: “In
this room in 1978, Dan Bricklin, MBA '79 conceived of the first spreadsheet program. VisiCalc,
original 'killer App' of the information age, forever changed how people use computers in
business.” B2