We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets. But we remember a time when there was no Excel. But there were still spreadsheets. How far back do they go?
Definitions
Like many things, exactly what constitutes a spreadsheet can be a little fuzzy. However, in general, a spreadsheet looks like a grid and allows you to type numbers, text, and formulas into the cells. Formulas can refer to other cells in the grid. Nearly all spreadsheets are smart enough to sort formulas based on which ones depend on others.
For example, if you have cell A1 as Voltage, and B1 as Resistance, you might have two formulas: In A2 you write “=A1/B1” which gives current. In B2 you might have “=A1*A2” which gives power. A smart spreadsheet will realize that you can’t compute B2 before you compute A2. Not all spreadsheets have been that smart.
There are other nuances that many, but not all, spreadsheets share. Many let you name cells, so you can simply type =VOLTS*CURRENT. Nearly all will let you specify absolute or relative references, too. With a relative reference, you might compute cell D1=A1*B1. If you copy this to row two, it will wind up D2=A2*B2. However, if you mark some of the cells absolute, that won’t be true. For example, copying D1=A1*$B$1 to row two will result in D2=A2*$B$1.
Not all spreadsheets mark rows and columns the same way, but the letter/number format is nearly universal in modern programs. Many programs still support RC references, too, where R4C2 is row four, column two. In that nomenclature, R[-1]C[2] is a relative reference (one row back, two rows to the right). But the real idea is that you can refer to a cell, not exactly how you refer to it.
So, How Old Are They?
LANPAR was probably the first spreadsheet program, and it was available for the GE400. The name “LANPAR” was LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random, but was also a fusion of the authors’ names. Want to guess the year? 1969. Two Harvard graduates developed it to solve a problem for the Canadian phone company’s budget worksheets, which took six to twenty-four months to change in Fortran. The video below shows a bit of the history behind LANPAR.
LANPAR might not be totally recognizable as a modern spreadsheet, but it did have cell references and proper order of calculations. In fact, they had a patent on the idea, although the patent was originally rejected, won on appeal, and later deemed unenforceable by the courts.
There were earlier, noninteractive, spreadsheet-like programs, too. Richard Mattessich wrote a 1961 paper describing FORTRAN IV methods to work with columns or rows of numbers. That generated a language called BCL (Business Computer Language). Others over the years included Autoplan, Autotab, and several other batch-oriented replacements for paper-based calculations.
Spreadsheets Get Personal
Back in the late 1970s, people like us speculated that “one day, every home would have a computer!” We just didn’t know what people would do with them outside of the business context where the computer lived at the time. We imagined people scaling up and down cooking recipes, for example. Exactly how do you make soup for nine people when the recipe is written for four? We also thought they might balance their checkbook or do math homework.
The truth is, two programs drove massive sales of small computers: WordStar, a word-processing program, and VisiCalc. Originally for the Apple ][, Visicalc by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston put desktop computers on the map, especially for businesses. VisiCalc was also available on CP/M, Atari computers, and the Commodore PET.
You’d recognize VisiCalc as a spreadsheet, but it did have some limitations. For one, it did not follow the natural order of operations. Instead, it would start at the top, work down a column, and then go to the next column. It would then repeat the process until no further change occurred.
However, it did automatically recalculate when you made changes, had relative and absolute references, and was generally interactive. You could copy ranges, and the program doesn’t look too different from a modern spreadsheet.
Sincere Flattery
Of course, once you have VisiCalc, you are going to invite imitators. SuperCalc paired with WordStar became very popular among the CP/M crowd. Then came the first of the big shots: Lotus 1-2-3. In 1982, this was a must-have application for the new IBM PC.
There were other contenders, each with its own claims to fame. Innovative Software’s SMART suite, for example, was among the first spreadsheets that let you have formulas that crossed “tabs.” It could also recalculate repeatedly until meeting some criteria, for example, recalculate until cell X20 is less than zero.
Probably the first spreadsheet that could handle multiple sheets to form a “3D spreadsheet” was BoeingCalc. Yes, Boeing like the aircraft. They had a product that ran on PCs or IBM 4300 mainframes. It used virtual memory and could accommodate truly gigantic sheets for its day. It was also pricey, didn’t provide graphics out of the box, and was slow. The Infoworld’s standard spreadsheet took 42.9 seconds to recalculate, versus 7.9 for the leading competitor at the time. Quatro Pro from Borland was also capable of large spreadsheets and provided tabs. It was used more widely, too.
Then Came Microsoft
Of course, the real measure of success in software is when the lawsuits start. In 1987, Lotus sued two spreadsheet companies that made very similar products (TWIN and VP Planner). Not to be outdone, VisiCalc’s company (Software Arts) sued Lotus. Lotus won, but it was a pyrrhic victory as Microsoft took all the money off the table, anyway.
Before the lawsuits, in 1985, Microsoft rolled out Excel for the Mac. By 1987, they also ported it to the fledgling Windows operating system. Of course, Windows exploded — make your own joke — and by the time Lotus 1-2-3 could roll out Windows versions, they were too late. By 2013, Lotus 1-2-3, seemingly unstoppable a few years earlier, fell to the wayside.
There are dozens of other spreadsheet products that have come and gone, and a few that still survive, such as OpenOffice and its forks. Quattro Pro remains available (as part of WordPerfect). You can find plenty of spreadsheet action in any of the software or web-based “office suites.”
Today and the Future
While Excel is 40, it isn’t even close to the oldest of the spreadsheets. But it certainly has kept the throne as the most common spreadsheet program for a number of years.
Many of the “power uses” of spreadsheets, at least in engineering and science, have been replaced by things like Jupyter Notebooks that let you freely mix calculations with text and graphics along with code in languages like Python, for example.
If you want something more traditional that will still let you hack some code, try Grist. We have to confess that we’ve abused spreadsheets for DSP and computer simulation. What’s the worst thing you’ve done with a spreadsheet?
Back in the day, people would walk into a computer store and say they wanted to buy a visicalc. They were given a bit of education and sold an Apple with Visicalc
Great History of Spreadsheets as a concept — only thing missing a brief mention of Lotus Improv.
I was about to mention Improv. It wasn’t first with pivot tables but was innovative in how they worked.
And Lucid 3D. That one was ahead of its time being ram resident before multitasking Windows.
I think it was Guy Kawasaki who said that Improv was the first spreadsheet that was good enough to criticize.
And a brief mention of 123 R3 the only true 3D spreadsheet ever. Plus a brief mention that after 40 years excel still cannot do a +-×÷ of two cells where one or both hold a string value, like 123 r2.01 could do. That creates all sorts of initialization issues. Work around is use sum()
“We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old”
.
Hey!!
Just wait till the internet gets old.
IMHO it is already getting old.
New concepts no longer appear at the rate they should, and Vint Serf sure feels betrayed with his last baby, Galactic Internet, made zero splash, drowned by loud trumpeting (pun intended) noise accompanying the latest marketing campaign selling what would better be described “door handles for a car” than the actual car, or the factory that makes these.
The Next Big Thing was really The Blockchain, and not much else since. One would imagine by now we should be connecting to anything in the Solar System using 7G (quantum entanglement) network that costs $12 per year to subscribe and use. No, we use $75/month 5G (in the US at least) that’s about the speed of the 1990s coax DSL (compressed stuffs), and it is actually cheaper to just go with the whatever cheapest cable internet instead.
Cloud computing, meh, distributed computing (botched Plan 9 revolution – which, in itself, was a copy from the earlier open-source project, which, in itself, wasn’t new to start with) resold and repackaged. Same difference.
I’m generally not a fan of AI, broadly, but I’ll begrudgingly admit it’s (nearly?) the first new-ish thing since the 1970s. Every modern, halfway mainstream OS is either a VAX/VMS derivative from 1977 (Windows NT and all versions 2000 and newer) or a Unix derivative of some flavor from 1971 (MacOSX, Linux, Android, iOS, *BSD, et al). Mainframe MVS dates from about ’73 or ’74 and is the “newest” of those OSes – some sites still run CMS.
Every time someone tries to do something “innovative”, it flies right into the “not compatible with the quadrillion lines of old code we have” wall. It’s 2025 and Windows 11 is the first windows that won’t run DOS code from 1981. (the 32 bit version of Win 10 can, and that’s why it even existed in the first place).
It’s probably a good thing web applications are hard to debug, javascript frameworks change monthly, and node.js is a complete clown show. Otherwise, all useful software would have been finished in the late 1980s and we’d be picking turnips for a living. It gets hot working out in the fields.
OK, got to replace the garlic in my belt…
end-of-rant
Well, we have Eliza programs for decades. ;)
They had been available on do-it-yourself CP/M systems since the 1970s.
Back in the day, about every Public Domain software collection had featured an Eliza clone.
On the PC, the popular Sound Blaster cards had included Dr. Sbaitso.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso
Then, on more serious side, there had been Q&A, Question and Answer of the mid-1980s.
It was a database program for DOS that could respond to human sentences.
It was translated into multiple languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_(Symantec)
Sure, it’s not that spectacular, maybe. But such stuff was there all the time.
Like there was speech synthesis out-of-box on Amiga 1000 or Macintosh since the 1980s.
Or voice recognition. OS/2 Warp 4 included it by 1995. Other platforms had it, too. As a third-party product, at worst
That.
I am with you right there, terribly written code (or systems set up by kindergarten graduates) is the main reason why I am still employed. Underpaid, yes, but employed.
AI is a welcome break from monotony that set in early 2000s. That decade was the last where things were popping in and out of existence (iToaster! etc), and it was already winding down by the 2008 crisis, which in itself, too, was predictable to happen (I’ve already noted that it looks suspiciously like the low of the Kontratiev Cycle) and make matters slow down even more.
What we are missing are not new bill gates, but new Seymour Crays, new Vint Serfs, the inventors and innovators who go on inventing unorthodox things without stopping for the mandatory break to examine potential conflicts of interests. In short, we need the new Quartz Watch leap forward – THAT kind of impact, not just better mechanical watch with more features nobody asked for.
(on the topic of quartz watch, IMHO, The Last Great Leap for the mechanical watch was the Bulova’s Accutron – quartz-run mechanical watch, a perfect middle-ground between the two, mechanical watch with a battery; that alone nearly destroyed any dreams of flat tourbillon, since it literally became obvious that the benefits of such would be quite overstated, so it slowed down the pure mechanical watch inventions; regardless, Accutron was still a battery hog by the modern standards, so it enjoyed some fame, but cheap ICs pretty much cut its era short – IMHO, unclear why, since better mechanical things now can be made using micromachinery, but I digress).
So what I am saying, we are well pass the Great Computerization Hump of the 1990s, what could have been computerized has been extensively computerized by now – quite well, too, and what remains (things that cannot be easily indexed or measured or otherwise calculated with math formulae) is being fed to the AI … which is just another tool … self-directed, but still a tool … and any tools is only as good as its master … which is where we are now, AI “masters” giving it tasks of mixed importance.
I’ve already stated what I need “AI, build me a sub-$200K house in the place of my choosing, with architecture/plan I need, and return with multiple ideas that are ready-to-be-made solutions, complete with contractors’ budgets, schedules based on real life data, all the municipal/state paperwork/permissions/inspections ready to order, all included in the final price tag.” Why it still cannot do that I do not know, but I don’t hold my breath it will any time soon.
Because I’ve witnessed how US is no longer is capable of making and selling its own domestic-made average car for no more than $15K per, final price with sales tax included. It can’t. AI, build me a $10K EV car, local-sourced parts, and drive it to my doorstep, cash paid on delivery – another thing that, I am afraid, will never happen. Why? I don’t know either, but both tasks should be achievable given the ungodly amount of computation power available. AI, if it is so smart, should be able to work out the logistics. While at it, it can also draw and shoot movies with what’s her face, Tilly Norwood – at the same time while planning my affordable house and my affordable car.
As far as I see it, I’ll have to conclude that the AI solutions I read about are mostly impotent. They cannot calculate obvious things that are needed.
I’ll stop for now. (there is more where that came from).
The internet is old: 1969 brought us the first human on the moon, LANPAR (see above), and the first ARPANET link, which many (including me) consider to be the birth of “the” internet that we know today.
People forget about X.25 and Packet Radio often. Or ALOHAnet..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
The internet wasn’t as important as people may think.
In fact, it’s pretty overrated these days.
Likely because we got so dependent of it nowadsys, so we became almost religious about it. Like a creation myth, sort of.
Anyway. Even without the ARPANET and later Internet there had been long-distance networks already being under development.
Just think of Minitel or CompuServe. They could work with X.25, no need for UDP or TCP/IP here.
The main difference was the federal or commercial nature of them, I must admit.
They weren’t treating both the user and provider as equal yet, so to say.
On internet, any participant (user) can both use and provide resources in principle.
It already is, and AI has rendered it unreachable. Plus it already was as HTML set back computing 100 years. Now imagine if the URL had been combined with postscript…
The worst thing? Probably one to keep track of episodes seen of tv shows.
In the UK, the NHS runs on ‘Excel databases’ in the hands of everyone from management downwards. My first gig in the NHS involved explaining that a ‘real’ database could deliver the hoped for output in seconds, rather than a mess of VLOOKUPs in Excel that would take hours.
Whereas I know time local government who (a few hundred thousand population) decided to get database software from a company company that I’m sure used Code generations for all of it.
It left the entire accounting staff having to double their work by making entries into the multi million dollar software that couldn’t do most of the basic reports or calculations. Any new report would require them to make a customer support ticket (hundreds of dollars per) and wait at least a couple weeks for it to be delivered have hopefully correct.
So, they had to double everything but keeping. . . Spreadsheets to be about you do things like see all invoices and payments for a given contractor ID, or, i kid you not, a list of incoming in an outgoing transactions for a given account .
With [redacted]s, you could pull up one(with an absurd number of steps), and then go all the way back to start and go their all the steps again. This could have been so much better to just move directly from incoming to outgoing within that account context, of to go back a step or two to redirect to the other post if the account.
To make things worse it was sooo slow. The Microsoft Access “database” in use before the “upgrade” was faster and more stable by a long shot, and much much more capable. Of course it was removed in favor of the other.
So now spreadsheets save the day!
Abusing for a long time, people have.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelblog/congrats-to-the-winners-of-the-2025-mecc–mewc/4475228
The paper worksheets that these programs replaced were called spreadsheets, so the name is older than the software.
Yes, exactly right. Paper spreadsheets, layout out options and features.
One day I hope we can be part of this:
https://app.ironcalc.com
I had VisiCalc on my TRS-80 III
Funny that, although the concept of spreadsheets is so old, there is still no open source spreadsheet app for Android except OpenOffice/LIbreOffice ports.
Whilst not open source, it was a monumental effort undertaken to get Lotus 123 running on Linux.
HaD covered the story a few years ago:
https://hackaday.com/2022/05/23/lotus-123-for-linux-is-like-a-digital-treasure-hunt/
This brings back memories of using WordStar and SuperCalc on an Osborne 1. Those applications were bundled with the Osborne. I later purchased SuperCalc for a PC compatible. It did everything I needed.
Long Before Excel, there was 2020, a Vax mainframe spreadsheet program that was huge. It included a lot of the mathematical, and statistical functions and Excel has now. I used it to develop a flat response audio speaker system for a class in 1980(ish). Nobody came close to my design. I was given an F for the final project (originally) because I didn’t do the hundreds of complex equations by hand. What I did was take all of the parametric values in a column and calculate a response for specifically-spaced frequencies in the top row. I made some simple calculations of max, min, and distribution of the response results and kept tinkering with parameters (they all had to be real-world values (electrical and mechanical). When I started getting results, I also increased the number of columns to squeeze out any notch responses. Eventually, I got Dr. T. To see what I had done and give me an A-. It would have ruined his class on electro-acoustics, or at least forced him to level-up the whole syllabus. Undergrad students were all using punch cards but I simply called the sysop and asked for the JCL to create an on-line account and dump card decks into files, then run them remotely. My sister had sent me a cradle modem that was about 150 baud. I found an old vt-52 terminal that wasn’t being used, where I worked nights, and learned to use a one-line editor (Son Of Stopgap – SoS) to make file modifications. I still had to print my results to the campus remotes, but my work was about a mile from campus. I could make a dozen run and modify iterations then drive over and pick up the greenbrier. There was very little in the way of digital security, then.
Many years ago I wrote a spreadsheet (sort of) for the HP 1000. It wasn’t exactly interactive, but it made it very easy to write a small bit of code that would show a grid on the HP terminal. Some cells were inputs and when you changed one, the outputs would recalculate. We used it as a shell to produce a lot of lab automation stuff. But it still took a programmer to put the brains in and compile it. Of course, that meant it could also read stuff from strange places and do any math you could dream up on the computer.
I also wrote the infamous spreadsheet to Fortran compiler (now you’d call it a transpiler, I suppose) to take the Chemical engineer’s spreadsheets and compile them to Fortran to run on the control system. It wasn’t even Fortran IV although it had some of the WHATFIV extensions. So one thing I learned about SMART spreadsheets is they were perfectly fine with dividing by zero and the spreadsheets depended on that (they would iterate and sometimes the cells were zero at the start or at the end). So the compiler had to rewrite all the formulas that had division to test for a zero divide first because there was no way to trap a divide by zero on that machine.
Wild days.
Yes .. I’ll give a Standing Ovation for the VAX 2020 spreadsheet program .. It was amazing .. We had it on a medium sized VAX .. I was the starving student babysitting the nightly VAX backups .. at a large chemistry lab ..
General Ledger. Look up history of General Ledger.
Years back I’ve programmed (yes, programmed, not just formula-created) in both Lotus 123 and Excel, since it was not clear which one would win, so we had to maintain solutions in both.
The terminal was a DEC VT-50. Each column calculated the response for a single frequency and every column referred parametric values from the first column. I only had to change a value in the first column for it to recalculate the whole spectrum. I finished a week before it was due. I probably should have waited until the last day, to turn it in. I gave him way too much time to digest and figure out how to punish me for my efforts. I don’t think very many people got to the required flatness across the specified bandwidth.
I think Sun Microsystems would still be around today if they had developed spreadsheet and word processing programs.
Sun did have an office suite. It was called Star Office.
It lives on today as LibreOffice.
True, they bought an office suite, but they did not develop one. Star Office was never an organic part of Sun. They were more interested in Java and selling expensive workstations.
You didn’t mention Lotus Improv and its cousin Quantrix, still going strong and better that Excel in almost every way.
Didn’t multiplan precede excel
It sure did. But somehow it did rate a mention here.
I remember using it running CPM on a commodore 128, using the Z80.
First job out of college was with Insight Software based in Dublin, they targeted IBM midrange systems like S/36, S/38, AS/400 – the flagship eponymous product was Insight, a spreadsheet (they also had A/R, A/P, G/L, payroll, etc.)… I was hired in 86, product was around a couple years already at that point.
Abusing Excel to the max:
http://excelunusual.com/
I have used Excel daily for almost 30 years …and I still lament features that Lotus 123 and Quattro Pro had and that Excel doesn’t on a daily basis. In Lotus, any entry field could contain formulas. So, in a chart data selection field you could have a formula that would select the appropriate data range based on entries in the spreadsheet. No muss, no fuss and didn’t require a learning curve like macros or quickbasic. Both Quattro and Lotus 123 also made beautiful graphs that didn’t randomly reformat themselves or default to absolute selection ranges. Lotus 123 with WYSIGYG and Quattro output pages that were line perfect, unlike Excel that messes with fonts and page formats.
Excel is functional but not elegant. Yes, I have made truly gigantic spreadsheets with Excel but I think the other programs were superior in terms of usability. I’m especially amazed because I was able to run Quattro on an IBM XT and Lotus on an 80286.
Remember doing spreadsheet on NeXTStep.
Lotus Improv I presume?
Yup.
One simple feature I miss. Protect a few cells. Select an area that included those cells and press delete. All the unprotected cells were deleted, but the protected ones remained untouched. It made reusing spreadsheets so easy.
“By 2013, Lotus 1-2-3, seemingly unstoppable a few years earlier, fell to the wayside”
?? 2013 ? Seriously !?
I recall using a DOS program called ASEASYAS that was “as easy as 1-2-3”. This was on orange screen XTs and 286’s in my school computer lab in the early 90’s. I also recall wasting time playing a DOS game called Beast, where an “H” chased you around the screen. Good times.
Before MS Excel, there was MS Multiplan, which i used to calculate physics problems with.
(on CP/M on an Amstrad CPC)
“it did automatically recalculate when you made changes”
It may have done so in the theoretical sense, but recalculation on the early spreadsheets was slow. Slow as in you could follow its progress across the screen with your finger. Most users turned it off and only pressed the recalc button when they were ready, then headed off to the coffee machine.
The history of the non-computerised spreadsheet goes back even further. I remember seeing an Open University programme which showed an old-ish film clip of a large number of people in an office at an insurance company all writing out and calculating spreadsheets by hand with pen and paper. Not even a calculator to help out.
Great article. I loved the Apple LisaCalc. As for applications, dont forget the LLM demo https://hackaday.com/2024/03/18/learn-ai-via-spreadsheet/
Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc fame is around on Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@danb
“What’s the worst thing you’ve done with a spreadsheet?”
I once saw marine engineers who prepared special spreadsheet they filled with data collected by motorman just to do some calculation on Casio calculator and put results in. I once suggested that this can be done by entering simple formula but they insist it’s better like this because they trust it more this way.
About Lotus 1-2-3 and MS Excel..
Lotus 1-2-3 was important for the development of EMS specification.
Because, large spreasheets ran out of memory on an IBM PC by mid-1980s.
The conventional memory on DOS topped out at 640 to 736 KB.
Implementing bank-switching like on the CP/M-80 platform thus became a necessity.
It’s notable that EMS was required for 8088/8086 PCs with 1MB address range, mainly.
The original EMS was meant to be used with physical EMS memory boards, rather than 80286/80386 PCs and LIMulators.
Secondly, Windows 2.x era introduced EMS support, too.
Larger Windows 2.x applications could use EMS, if they were especially written for it.
The EMS could be provided by either Windows/386 or by any other EMS driver.
Last but not least, Windows 2.0 was developed to suit the PC-version of MS Excel – rather than other way round.
Yes, Windows 2.x was meant to be the last Windows release at one point in history.
Its final “hurray” was meant to be as a runtime for running MS Excel.
That’s why some new features and bugfixes were added to Windows 2, to begin with.
But when OS/2 development struggled, Windows development was continued.
PS: Both MS WinWord and Excel can do use EMS on Windows 2.x.
Having 2, 4 or more Megabyte on an EMS card by 1988 was no luxury.
Documents grew in size dramatically at the time.
the c64 had a number of them. see the link
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Spreadsheet
Cool! 😎 I wonder how many of them supported memory expansion such as Commodore REU!
Or if they had the ability to draw pie charts, support for Commodore 128 etc..
Oh I remember typing in SpeedCalc (and SpeedScript) from binary dumps with checksums every line Compute! used for entering such programs.
Fun article. Brought back fond memories. In the 80’s, I was one of the few in the office that learned the ins and outs of Lotus 1-2-3. I built a model of a new plant (whose design was being debated) to simulate how many processes were required to lower a certain chemical below a key threshold. It was a difficult simulation because there were numberous recirculating streams in the plant design. Before goal seaking was a Lotus 1-2-3 feature, I built a macro that changed all the inputs through ranges and iterated until certain levels were met, and it recorded all the results for later inspection. When I showed it to my bosses, they were blown away, and I ended up winning a company R&D award for the work. Ahhhh … good times. :-)
Probably the worst (or, at least the most tedious) thing I’ve done with a spreadsheet was to track down errors in an implementation of trig and exponential/logarithmic functions in 32-bit IEEE floating-point arithmetic for a BASIC runtime engine I developed to run on a PIC16C74 more than thirty years ago.
I wrote a BASIC program on the PIC to print out the results of the calculations, increment the input argument, and loop around. I captured the results with my terminal program as a CSV file and imported that into Excel. I had Excel produce its own results for the functions, calculate the difference from my program’s results, and plot the differences. Correct results would show error values around +/- 1 LSB, with inputs that weren’t calculated correctly producing larger differences in the output plot. When I saw an input argument that didn’t produce correct results, I’d set a breakpoint in the PIC code and call it with that argument, step through the instructions until I saw something go wrong, determine what the problem was, and correct it.
You forget Doom on a spreadsheet… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2qU7t6Jmfw
OK, I never see anything about Framework. The story I heard was an Apple developer was engaged by George Tate of Ashton-Tate to come up with a spreadsheet to complement dBase and compete with Lotus. I used Framework for six years while I worked at A-T, and I still think it was superior to 1-2-3. When Borland bought A-T in ‘91, FW was retired.
Framework was my first PC software. I bought it for my wife to use the word processor for her thesis, and then used it to learn how to do spreadsheets. I still have a very large excel spreadsheet to keep track of, and do predictions for, my retirement income until I turn 100. I looked at how much I had been making or losing on my investments and inflation statistics to come up with a statistical treaments of the uncertainties for returns and inflation. I then developed my own Monte Carlo method of using recursive references to internal variables to see what happened to my finances for 60 years. It was a way to get some idea about how good or bad they might get – I don’t expect that any particular run will actually occur. But the actual results of the investments and inflation history are well bounded by the Monte Carlo runs, so I sleep pretty well at night.
I think I have the original FW disks, but nothing will run it – there are timing dependencies that cause it to crash on startup.
A few cool things about the VisiCalc assembly language sources: Frankston wrote his own 6502 cross-assembler that ran on a Prime minicomputer, and it was a “structured assembly language” (e.g. IF-THEN-ELSE) that undoubtedly prevented some coding mistakes. Sadly, the complete source code of the original Apple ][ VisiCalc has been lost, although founder and coder Charles Frankston told me he holds out hope that there is a listing or mag tape in the archives of Lotus/IBM’s law firm involved in the 1-2-3 litigation. Whereas my imagination goes straight to the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark featuring a giant government warehouse whose contents never see the light of day again.
Best/Worst spreadsheet use?
Those MONSTER sized character record sheets from the late 90s/early 00s.
I’m talking a honking huge 125MB sheet with a tab for each splat book your campaign is using that can each be toggled on/off, dozens of tabs for calculation, and tabs for each extra type of sheet.
Magic user? Toggle those spell sheets on. Make sure it’s the correct kind of arcane/divine/chaos/etc type too.
Got followers? They have sheets too.
Party own a merchant empire? Better turn on the economic overview and inventory sheets.
After you spent 25 minutes to load the sheet and edited the relevant cells, you get to print perfectly laid out paper sheets that look like the real thing because they have all the embedded images from the source material.
Grand.
I remember having to do a ram upgrade on an original Pentium 2 just to stop the machine from crashing.