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VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
- inktype 2y agoSee also: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/lotus123.html https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/lotus123.html And: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31455968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31455968
- WillAdams 2y agoOne of my more vivid memories from childhood was the guy who pulled up to the computer store in a Trans Am, walked up to the counter and said, "I want a Visicalc." After the salesperson explained that it was a computer program which ran on an Apple ][, the guy said something to the effect of, "Set me up with what I need.", and the salesperson proceeded to put together pretty much one of everything in the store all of which was then loaded into the Trans Am, and after writing a check, the hopeful accountant drove off. A while back, when I read the book _Diver's Down: Adventure Beneath Hawaiian Seas_ to my kids I had to explain what slide rules and adding machines and ledger sheets were --- it's really remarkable how we have finally reached Babbage's exclamation: >"I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam."
- jkaptur 2y agoThat setup cost in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars (adjusted for inflation). Spreadsheets are amazing.
- Jtsummers 2y agoThe Apple II was originally priced at $1298 in 1977 dollars, that's more than $6700 today. A "one of everything" setup would be 5-figures in today's dollars. Even the later Apple IIe cost over $4k adjusted to today's dollars.
- ghaff 2y agoMachrone's Law (the longtime editor of PC Magazine) was that the PC you wanted cost $5K in the currency of the time. And that held for quite a long time.
- fuzztester 2y agoBill Machrone, from memory. Some of the early PC Magazine utilities were cool.
- ghaff 2y agoSome of the assembly language columns got me into doing a spin-off DOS file manager utility that I worked on for quite a while.
- fuzztester 2y agoOh, cool. I like assembly language. Early in my career, I read some books about it, including a few about programming for the 6502 processor, and later, Peter Norton's "Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC". I thought the latter book was very good, just like his Norton Utilities and other software. I did a fair amount of hobby 6502 assembly language programming on the Commodore 64, and a bit on the BBC Micro. The Beeb had a cool inline assembly feature, using which you could write 6502 assembly code inline in the middle of your BBC BASIC code, just by wrapping the assembly code in square brackets. There was no need of an explicit assembly step. The inline assembly code would just run as part of the running of the BASIC code.
- elzbardico 2y agoBelieve me or not, but I loved the ads in early PC Magazine (that I usually read as a kid a couple months later in my public library in Brazil thanks to some unknown subscriber’s donation). I used to daydream about the equipment in the ads like other kids did with cars in car magazines
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- ghaff 2y agoI don't remember what I paid for PC and printer, but I'm sure my IBM PC clone (with dual floppies) was well into the $4K plus range in today's dollars in 1982 or so. And software wasn't cheap either. A hard disk would have added multiple thousands of dollars. (Where I was working paid $5K in then dollars for an Apple III hard disk.) When I went to grad school a couple of years later, I was one of very few people who owned a PC.
- MaDeuce 2y agoYou're spot on. The IBM XT was introduced immediately after I graduated and went to work. My employer's employees got a 20% discount from IBM, as IBM was a client. I bought an XT (PC + 10MB hard drive) for $4K (list price $5K). A lot of money then for a new grad. The contrast between then and now is stunning. And software costs... this was also the era when every "application" (think accounting software: accounts payable, payroll, accounts receivable, word processing) was $495 per application. A small business could easily pay $2-5K for basic software to run their business. And then, of course, it was a nightmare to setup and use and almost impossible to pull off without a "consultant". But VisiCalc -- it was such a game changer. A totally different way of using a PC that enabled the "ordinary" non-computer person to become an order of magnitude more productive. I think Lotus 123 was the pinnacle of golden era of keyboard-driven spreadsheets, but it was only an incremental improvement over VisiCalc. The journey into the abyss began with Lotus Symphony. I do like Excel and use it on occasion. But I pine for the days of lean software that did one thing exceptionally well.
- fuzztester 2y agoRelated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattro_Pro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattro_Pro ( When version 1.0 was in development, it was codenamed "Buddha" since it was meant to "assume the Lotus position". )
- punk-coder 2y agoI worked at a web hosting company in Atlanta back in 2002, called Interland. In 2003 we purchased a company called Trellix which let you build websites through a web interface. I remember our first meeting with Trellix when some guy walked through the door to the conference room; t-shirt covered by a flannel, ripped jeans, Converse, long hair and beard. I was like, “holy sh*t, it’s Dan Bricklin!” He was great to work with. One of those rare times you meet someone who can be listed as a big contributor to your field of work.
- andrewstuart 2y agoIt must have really hurt to invent and build Visicalc then get wiped out totally by Lotus 123. I seem to recall Dan Bricklin having a pretty good attitude about it - I think he's here on HN he might chime in.
- AlbertCory 2y agoLotus had a record-breaking (at the time) product launch cost of $1 million or so. Software products were never so splashy. I was at Analytica (Reflex), which had a serious case of Lotus Envy: right down to the $495 price tag, and an expensive program to train computer store sales people (because that's how software got sold, you know /s ). Reflex was sort of like a spreadsheet, but it was not positioned as a Lotus competitor. Even in the early 80's, that was seen as impossible for anyone except the gigantic players. Reflex sold around 60 copies a week, burning $7 million of VC money, until Borland bought the company and cut the price to $99. Common shareholders (e.g. me) got nothing.
- andrewstuart 2y agoI worked on supporting Microsoft Multiplan back in those days. One of the guys at work had been making a spreadsheet literally all night and at the end of the night he pressed the keys to exit Multiplan and it simply exited as it was told and he lost all his work - back then programs hadn't advanced to the point of asking "save before exit y/n?".
- galkk 2y ago> Note: I have just learned that Bob Frankston also used VisiCalc to do his 1978 tax return. In the process, he discovered he needed a lookup table for the tax rates, and incorporated the @lookup command then and there. One of most impressive and sad parts for me. Sad in the sense that nowadays everything is so complicated that you almost never can implement significant pieces of tech just because you need it and competent
- d0mine 2y agoIt depends on the tools you use e.g., emacs is programmable not just in theory but in practice. Every key press executes a customizable command. It scales from just a few use-package tweaks in your init.el to complete apps such as Magit, Org-mode. CLI tools can be easily composable and help automate everyday tasks: accept input from stdin/write results to stdout, put diagnostic on stderr, exit with non-zero code on error. Once you'd learned shell pipeline syntax in 1978, you are set for decades. Modern web is less useful to support something like Yahoo pipes but there are http APIs that are relatively easy to access. Scraping might be an option still. Combining ios shortcuts with Pythonista scripts can help on mobile.
- WillAdams 2y agoOne still can, if one uses tools which are programmable. Rather than use Autodesk Fusion 360, I use OpenSCAD, so when I wanted my own CAM setup I began work on: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview (which was muchly boosted by: https://pythonscad.org/ https://pythonscad.org/ ) Rather than be limited by Quark XPress and PageMaker, I learned and used TeX which has allowed me to do pretty much anything I can write a (La)TeX macro for --- current project is a recursive macro which takes a list of water systems and their connections and outputs each system's connections --- but it allows one to do pretty much anything one needs: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/31088/any-automated-system-to-compute-the-linear-length-of-a-letters-in-a-word-or-ph/31094#31094 https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/31088/any-... That said, I did do a lot of AppleScript programming, and the InDesign integration was esp. nice (even managed to write a script which could manage four-level deep indexes which was said to be impossible by Adobe's Scripting Evangelist). I'd love to see a list of scriptable opensource applications --- some notable ones from memory: - LyX - pyspread - Krita
- hbn 2y agoIf VisiCalc had been written for a different computer, where would you be? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o
- Lio 2y agoFor anyone interested in a terminal driven spreadsheet, SC-IM[1] was mentioned on HN recently. 1. https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im