6 ms·
Apple's early success stemmed from a tiny 20kb computer program they didn't make
- JoeyBananas 5y ago20Kb was not tiny back in the day
- gamache 5y agoThat's a nice snippet of the original source code! Does anyone recognize the language? Googling tells me that VisiCalc was written in Apple II (6502) assembly, but this is clearly not that.
- rylandking 5y agoYeah, pretty cool to see a photo of that. It was coded in assembler, first for the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor used in the Apple II.
- tyingq 5y agoI imagine the answer is somewhere in here: http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc
- gamache 5y agoGreat link! The answer is that it's written in a custom 6502 assembler macro language that abstracted over looping, and the macros were an extension of a 6502 assembler that was hosted on Multics.
- mikestew 5y agoLooks like macro-heavy assembly to me. If one is not familiar with macro assemblers, in summary you could write your own language in macro assembler. And some did, which makes for a great debugging session if you're the one that has to fix it long after the original dev left. This page explains better than I ever will: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/assembly_programming/assembly_macros.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/assembly_programming/assembly...
- jedimastert 5y agoOT: I had a research project many years ago (it feels strange that I can now call it "many") that was to translate a program into C. The original program was written in "FORCE", which was a macro language extension on top of Fortran that we no longer had a compiler for. It was absolutely fascinating.
- timthorn 5y agoNot sure I'd have called 20kB tiny at the time!
- rylandking 5y agoTrue! Bob Frankston actually worked super hard to get VisiCalc's code to fit inside 16KBs so it could be used on the lower-end Apple II. But he couldn't make it happen. So it only ended up as usable on the more expensive $2,500 Apple II
- nacs 5y agoNowadays, they'd just cut features from the 20KB version to make it fit into 16KB and sell it as the Standard edition (and sell the full 20KB one as the "Premium HD+" edition).
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoThe headline on the article (and the <title> tag, from what I can see) is "The 20KB Computer Program That Changed The World"; the title used here seems like it's deliberately reaching for an anti-Apple spin. I mean, WordPerfect absolutely sold hundreds of thousands of DOS computers, but "Microsoft's early success stemmed from a [insert size of WordPerfect] program they didn't make" would...raise eyebrows, wouldn't it?
- StevePerkins 5y agoYes, the title is clickbait. But there has been endless snide commentary over the past 4-5 decades about Excel and Word being ripoffs of other companies' inventions. Hell, Microsoft famously didn't develop MS-DOS!
- rylandking 5y agoDOS = disk operating system for anyone curious
- gamache 5y agodisk = an obsolete long-term storage medium, in case anyone was wondering
- ep103 5y agostorage medium = what people used before we all ascended to the cloud, in case anyone was wondering
- smoldesu 5y agowondering = what we used to do before the internet, if anyone was curious
- diogenesjunior 5y ago
- genmon 5y agoThis is crazy petty, I know, but the article starts with “You’ve never heard of Dan or Bob. But you should have.” I mean, I do know about VisiCalc. But even if I didn’t, don’t try to shame me for it — learning is awesome. This kind of negging from a blog post always makes me dismiss it as linkbait even when the subject matter (as with this piece) is actually pretty good.
- sokoloff 5y agoDan Bricklin was at some local tech event I was at several years back. I sort of recognized him, but had to surreptitiously check his name badge to be sure. Being old, I [sort of] knew who he was but figured most of the folks in our circle wouldn’t. Intending to honor him, I dropped a line about how smart the team who created Lotus 1-2-3 must have been. Needless to say, Dan was not as amused/honored at my reference as I’d intended (had I gotten his product correct).
- blendergeek 5y agoWhen I read this, I don't think the article is criticizing me, the reader. Rather, I think the article is criticizing the world that allowed the reader to never hear of Dan or Bob (as apparently Dan and Bob were pretty cool and everybody should hear about them).
- jacobolus 5y ago“You should have heard of this” is always an (implicit) criticism of whoever you should have heard it from (e.g. your parents, teachers, doctor, pastor, boss, news media, or the society at large), not a criticism of you yourself. But here the intended meaning is more along the lines of “it is unfortunate that we all collectively pay so much attention to Bill & Steve but don’t also remember and celebrate Dan and Bob”.
- gamache 5y agoI don't find it petty at all. Authors who resort to these tricks for positive effects should answer to the negative effects too.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
- M0r13n 5y agoGreat example that good software is more important than good hardware. The best hardware will not sell if the user experience is poor due to bad software. The opposite is much easier. As long as the software works reasonably well, customers are more likely to overlook problems in the hardware. That's why there are still so many crappy Windows laptops. The screen is bad, the keyboard is creaky, and the display is from 2010, but Windows works for most users. So people buy.
- mwfunk 5y agoReally the entire personal computer industry's early success was due to VisiCalc, followed by Lotus 1-2-3. Likewise for WordStar, then WordPerfect. It was the first thing I ever heard referred to in the press as a "killer app", which I think of every time someone here makes the claim that nobody called applications "apps" before the iOS App Store.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoThere's some nuance there though, "killer app" is sometimes short for "application" in the sense of "use" not "program"[1]. When Steve Jobs said "the killer app is making calls." in the iPhone intro, he wasn't talking about the dialer app. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application#Usage
- drewcoo 5y agoThat was his attempt to stretch and own the term. The term that had been credited instead of St. Jobs with Apple's success.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoLater on the App Store could certainly be credited with Apple's success, but not during the iPhone intro, though? I think people had been saying "our killer app is X" (where X was not a piece of software but an approach to doing something) for quite a while before that.
- chasil 5y agoI actually used Microsoft Multiplan for a short time. Both Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony remain embedded in my muscle memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan
- codetrotter 5y ago> every time someone here makes the claim that nobody called applications "apps" before the iOS App Store. Also I remember that many warez sites used to have a section called “appz” where you could find cracked applications for Windows. This was before the iPhone even existed.
- quantified 5y agoI don’t read it as anti-Apple, maybe I don’t have that annoyance sensor. If you remember the phrase “killer app”, the OG killer app was Visicalc. People would buy your thing if it had a killer app. There were a great many more options for computers at the time. Were you going to get an Amiga, a TRS-80, a Commodore 64, a Sinclair, or any of the others? Apple didn’t make the software that made it so successful. Not a problem, we all need friends.