I remember playing around with Multiplan and 1-2-3 in the 80s but the first time I saw Excel I knew I witnessed the birth of the greatest SW product of all time

I remember playing around with Multiplan and 1-2-3 in the 80s but the first time I saw Excel I knew I witnessed the birth of the greatest SW product of all times, ever. At the time engineers still spent a lot of time writing crappy one-off homebrew scientific apps and Excel really helped as a first platform for calculations you didn't want to do on your calculator. It's hard to imagine now but at the time PCs were command-line only and the early Excel versions, at least the one I saw, booted up a runtime version of Windows just to run Excel. I'm not sure whether they ported it over from MacOS to that special version or what but it was shocking to see.