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While the ad isn’t that impressive, I’m mainly just impressed by how much of the important functionality of Excel was already figured out by 1992. I expected fo

by jchw 5y ago

While the ad isn’t that impressive, I’m mainly just impressed by how much of the important functionality of Excel was already figured out by 1992. I expected formulas and at least some decent formatting and editing tools, but I was not expecting interpolation, what appears to be the most important custom number formatting features still today, and the automatic table styling. That all already existed and was in an advertisement before I was even born. Pretty cool. (I know a lot of the innovation came earlier with software like VisiCalc, but that’s distant enough to be hard for me to appreciate.)

luckman212 5y ago
I still didn't know you could select a bunch of cells and drag and drop them as a single unit. I've always just used cut and paste. 40 years later, better late than never! Now, if someone can explain to me why, in 2022, the Online/365 version of Microsoft Word cannot insert a simple horizontal rule...
- mr_johnson22 4y ago
  Meanwhile, whenever I try a drag-and-drop today, Excel complains that "Something has gone wrong with the clipboard". So much for progress...
m_mueller 5y ago
I know it’s not spreadsheets and even more distant, but I think it’s worth it for you to check [1] to see the origin of much of HID to this date. Best in mind that all of what you see there was done by 12 people from scratch (no OS, not even assembled hardware) in roughly 2 years until 1968. [1] https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY
adenozine 4y ago
The generation before yours is lacking neither intellect nor creativity. We had Calculus in school and the *real* LSD back then. It's also worth noting that the desired feature set of a spreadsheet is rather universal. Like a paint program, or a music player. Spreadsheets go thousands of years back in human history, and are very well understood as a means and notation for expressing data and expressing calculations over collections. It's not at all a mystery what features will do well in a spreadsheet program. I've never worked on a spreadsheet program from that side but I have to imagine that the operational abstract of the team centering around how to educate users about how to use the various features they painstakingly develop. It's well known that spreadsheets are difficult to program, because users will inevitable collect larger and larger amounts of data in them, and it needs to do large amounts of calculations very quickly. So right off the bat you already know that a ton of man-hours are sunk into each feature overall, but then you need to really nail down a rock-solid visual grammar and teach the user some sort of intuition for finding these functions as quickly and consistently as possible, lest they get frustrated and leave. Anyhow. I always find it laughably rude, yet predictable, reading these sorts of comments. As if anybody born before 1980 could have possibly understood the deep enigma of other human beings using computers. Source: I'm in my 50s.
- weakfish 4y ago
  I don’t think you’re giving a charitable interpretation of the parent - I interpreted the comment as saying they’re impressed that the technology was impressive for the time rather than being critical of the generation
- jchw 4y ago
  I’ve tried writing code on a 486dx, which I believe is a contemporary CPU for that era. It’s not necessarily that nobody could come up with anything like this, it’s more impressive to me that it was basically already there for a lot of these things, in an environment that is, well, to be honest, quite difficult to eek good performance out of. (And of course, heavily limited in memory. With toolchains and development environments that are constrained similarly.)
simonh 4y ago
The advantage Excel had in 1992 was it had already existed on the Mac for 7 years and had been highly successful as a Mac application. Conversely the early Windows versions had, like Windows before 3.0, not really got any traction. This meant that when Windows really took off in the early 90s, Excel was already a quite mature GUI app.

by jchw 5y ago

luckman212 5y ago

I still didn't know you could select a bunch of cells and drag and drop them as a single unit. I've always just used cut and paste. 40 years later, better late than never! Now, if someone can explain to me why, in 2022, the Online/365 version of Microsoft Word cannot insert a simple horizontal rule...

mr_johnson22 4y ago
Meanwhile, whenever I try a drag-and-drop today, Excel complains that "Something has gone wrong with the clipboard". So much for progress...

m_mueller 5y ago

I know it’s not spreadsheets and even more distant, but I think it’s worth it for you to check [1] to see the origin of much of HID to this date. Best in mind that all of what you see there was done by 12 people from scratch (no OS, not even assembled hardware) in roughly 2 years until 1968. [1] https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

adenozine 4y ago

The generation before yours is lacking neither intellect nor creativity. We had Calculus in school and the *real* LSD back then. It's also worth noting that the desired feature set of a spreadsheet is rather universal. Like a paint program, or a music player. Spreadsheets go thousands of years back in human history, and are very well understood as a means and notation for expressing data and expressing calculations over collections. It's not at all a mystery what features will do well in a spreadsheet program. I've never worked on a spreadsheet program from that side but I have to imagine that the operational abstract of the team centering around how to educate users about how to use the various features they painstakingly develop. It's well known that spreadsheets are difficult to program, because users will inevitable collect larger and larger amounts of data in them, and it needs to do large amounts of calculations very quickly. So right off the bat you already know that a ton of man-hours are sunk into each feature overall, but then you need to really nail down a rock-solid visual grammar and teach the user some sort of intuition for finding these functions as quickly and consistently as possible, lest they get frustrated and leave. Anyhow. I always find it laughably rude, yet predictable, reading these sorts of comments. As if anybody born before 1980 could have possibly understood the deep enigma of other human beings using computers. Source: I'm in my 50s.

weakfish 4y ago
I don’t think you’re giving a charitable interpretation of the parent - I interpreted the comment as saying they’re impressed that the technology was impressive for the time rather than being critical of the generation
jchw 4y ago
I’ve tried writing code on a 486dx, which I believe is a contemporary CPU for that era. It’s not necessarily that nobody could come up with anything like this, it’s more impressive to me that it was basically already there for a lot of these things, in an environment that is, well, to be honest, quite difficult to eek good performance out of. (And of course, heavily limited in memory. With toolchains and development environments that are constrained similarly.)

simonh 4y ago

The advantage Excel had in 1992 was it had already existed on the Mac for 7 years and had been highly successful as a Mac application. Conversely the early Windows versions had, like Windows before 3.0, not really got any traction. This meant that when Windows really took off in the early 90s, Excel was already a quite mature GUI app.