3 ms·
I have a copy of VisiCalc on a 5¼" floppy that I can boot on a IBM 5155 'luggable'. It is surprisingly 1-2-3 like. You can see that Lotus directly ripped off
by vic-traill 3y ago
I have a copy of VisiCalc on a 5¼" floppy that I can boot on a IBM 5155 'luggable'.
It is surprisingly 1-2-3 like. You can see that Lotus directly ripped off Dan conceptually. I don't have enough background to know if Lotus 1-2-3 implemented significant improvements over VisiCalc; I do think that Dan Bricklin was a visionary to see that a 'what-if?' analysis on a blackboard would be an incredible exercise in what came to be called a spreadsheet.
[The luggable boots a version of DOS that doesn't support sub-directories, so it is pre-2.0.]
- ghaff 3y agoIt was definitely a revolutionary concept. Subsequent lawsuits, e.g. with Quattro and 1-2-3, determined it wasn't IP-protectable for the most part. But VisiCalc absolutely laid out a fundamentally incredibly important application model for which the creators never made a lot of money. (And fundamentally different variants of VisiCalc never went much of anywhere.) The same could be said of the web but this is even truer.
- tabtab 3y agoBack then software copyrights and patents were even murkier than they are now.
- chihuahua 3y agoA few years ago I had a copy of visicalc.exe sitting around on a USB drive. It runs fine on whatever version of Windows I had back then - Win7 or newer. For all I know, the same executable still runs on Windows 11.
- EvanAnderson 3y agoThere no 16-bit emulation (NTVDM) in Windows 11 (since it’s 64-bit only). 32-bit Windows 10 would run VisiCalc fine, though.