Spreadsheets are not just for business use, but also scientific, industrial, medical, mathematical, etc. They are the extension of the calculator that NEEDED to exist! This man thought it up and I sincerely thank him for his contribution to humanity.
And this video proves much more what you said, and that people still don't understand the importance of spreadsheets yet. Just 125K views for this video... Please, come on! This man is a genius!🤦♂️
A simple spreadsheet can make a great list of things, a database of any kind, simple calculations for a common computer user. Not only business/financial stuff.
@@charliedays I agree. Probably 95% of people these days take spreadsheet software for granted while also grossly underestimating its power and capability.
@@LagMasterSam I'm aware that people overuse the "underrated" word nowadays for everything that is not considered "popular." But this is indeed an underrated invention. The masses will know about Apple's founder everywhere, but not the one who created the spreadsheet. That shows you the lack of general knowledge right there.😶
Unfortunately, they are also one of the most abused programs about. The number of times I've seen them used as a database of whatever, then they try and shuffle things around, disjointing columns of cells from others, (i.e. accidentally sorting one column only) and ending up with a totally garbled mess. It's just not funny!
I was at the Apple Developer Conference about 10 years ago and I sat down to lunch and read the name tag of the guy across from me. Dan Bricklin. I said "THE Dan Bricklin??" I think he was pleased that I recognized the name. He modestly acknowledged his role in the history of computers, which is massive, it has to be said.
@@christophercolumbus8944 Pretty sure everybody stole everything from Visicalc and Dan and boned him for royalties for Lotus 123 and Excel and Sheets and whatever else came after it.
My first encounter with VisiCalc was on a colleague's new Apple II home computer after a pleasant dinner. I had been tearing my hair out for a couple of days trying to balance out the component values for a switch-mode power supply. After entering the basic formulae describing my problem, I found I was able to tweak anything and quickly see the COMPLETE result. I was blown away! BTW that 30-40 minutes work produced an end result that performed just as required. Thank you Dan - on behalf of all engineers around the planet.
I was a kid with a IIe back in the day. I couldn't afford VisiCalc so I wrote my own. It was in BASIC and not Assembly, but it worked pretty well. My dad used it for his business because he wasn't sure that he wanted to make the investment for an "expensive" computer that used "lots of power" (the IIe would draw 75W peak - but he had mainframe fog - LOL). I kept developing for Apple, and then they started charging for their software development kit - which I couldn't afford - so I left the Apple ecosystem and never looked back. What a great presenter and what a great story. A real person with vision.
I really wanted to program for the Mac but the whole shelf of fancy white binders of secrets was priced way out of reach and I couldn't steal it, so I never bothered. The farthest I ever got was making desktop game widgets in codewarrior. Then I found Borland Turbo C++ for DOS at like, $40 in 1994. I think Apple's bizarre software ecosystem is what really killed their business from the 80s thru the late 90s. Jobs somehow made the NeXT even worse to program, and OS X still suffers from that company's mistakes.
@@stickyfox I am glad, in a way, that others share my experience. I tell this story to fanboyz occasionally and they look at me like I have two heads. I don't think they understand what the magnitude of cost was for Apple's early tools. I don't know what it is today - I've never had to go there again. But I loved their product... truly groundbreaking.
@@stickyfox I remember when Borland made Quattro-Pro but I never saw it. However, I saw Borland Quattro-Pro advertised in PC Magazine. Unnecessarily, I went to a computer school to learn an Office Technology course. There, I learned SuperCalc on an IBM PC computer. I mentioned that I went to a technical school unnecessarily, because I did not need it. I possess solid typewriting skills that should enable me to be hired in any firm and to be cross-trained as necessary. When I was disabled in 2002, I bought my own microcomputer, called Cybernet, with Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office XP Professional, with Microsoft Publisher 2002. I learned more things that I would not possibly learn in a job.
@@captainkeyboard1007 I was a BIG fan of Supercalc. It came with my used Osborne and then I bought it for my wife's Apple lle. I could maneuver around with Supercalc pretty fast.
@@nemo227 I like the microcomputer concept because creating documents and files on it affords the benefit of controlling them and working with them in many ways; and it enhances my keyboard skill, since I was an avid typist at 12 years-old. Thank you very much for tapping or even typing to me. Happy Keyboarding!
So he was a dude that was annoyed with something, so came up with his own tool to so it. I can't begin to explain how many times I have seen people use Excel to do this exact thing. I know someone who basically Excel'd himself out of a job. The spreadsheet was so thorough it turned an entire career into a 30 minute daily proccess thanks to digital spreadsheets. This man is a hero of modern times. He has inspired so many people who didn't realise they were even inspired. It's such a basic tool anyone can use, yet deeply powerful. I'm going to go cry for a bit because this dude is such a legend.
I find it interesting that throughout this talk he pushes the value of prototyping. After Visicalc his next major product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program for creating interactive prototypes and demos. I used it a lot in the late '80s to prototype new products where I worked at the time.
@@bunkie2100 I remember TK!Solver. The reason it wasn't a big hit is simply that the market for people who can find use for an electronic spreadsheet is *GINORMOUS.* Not so much, however, for equation solvers.
A true pioneer and computing legend. Thank you Dan! I learned Lotus 123 in business school and have since made my career about programming Excel. The spreadsheet truly is the killer app.
I met Dan back in 1980 when he gave a presentation at Chapman College in So. Cal. for the TRS80 users group. I was very impressed with the first "business" application for a personal computer other than a word processor. The TRS80 badly needed a powerful program like Visicalc and he delivered. I have used every spreadsheet program since. But I still have fond memories of the first for the PC.
I actually had VisiCalc running on my Apple II. In fact I still have both the computer and the software package. Today I work on extremely huge environmental research spreadsheets using Excel to number crunch millions of cells. Thank you, Dan!
My first job title in IT, at the age of 20 (late 80s), was “Spreadsheet Programmer”! That job was using Supercalc 5 on PCs, but by then I was already a spreadsheet expert, having started with VisiCalc on a TRS-80 Model 2 at the age of 13, and moving on to Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM XT during my later teens. Dan and Bob changed my life and I’m so grateful to them. I’m in my mid 50s now and still don’t take spreadsheets for granted. They’re still an wonderful tool.
Coursera may change my life because of Excel itself. I'm doing the Excel specialization as I write this comment. Did you finish your Excel courses? I hope you're doing great with those office skills.😀
THANK YOU! I started my accounting career with 13 column pads, slide rules and punch cards for computer work ( FORTRAN 2 and COBOL). I have used Visicalc, Lotus123, Quatro Pro, and Excel. Your vision has changed my life.
@@nemo227 I read a little book around 50 years ago on how to make a timetable for the whole school, to make sure each class had a teacher and a room for each period. The deputy head was supposed to start in his summer holiday by spreading a sheet out on his living room floor ...
over the years - i've marveled at Excel and the idea of the spreadsheet - amazed that something as narrowly focused as a accountant's spreadsheet - could turn into such an all powerful tool - - i never knew who came up with the idea - Dan Bricklin has every right to feel as proud of his little baby as any other inventor - considering how much and how many ways its descendants are being used - he has without doubt played in as big part in shaping today's modern world as Gates & Jobs etc
I was a Fortune 500 corporate accountant and one of the first gen of "spreadsheet jockeys" who used "Lotus 1-2-3", essentially the software that "absorbed or killed" VisiCalc, take your pick. Lotus is also, of course, now long gone, killed off by Excel. It can't be expressed strongly enough how electronic spreadsheets revolutionized business productivity. I was able to shorten our monthly accounting closing cycle from 4 days to 2 by directly downloading data from our mainframe into a "multi-dimensional" spreadsheet that I designed and customized. This allowed for instantaneous updating and adjustments on the fly, whereas prior to that all input was done via "dumb terminals" directly into the mainframe on a "captive" financial program that was not "customizable". Made my job a heck of a lot easier, although it was surprising, or maybe not, how many feathers I ruffled when I implemented it. People don't like change, especially when you show them up. Looking back upon this time, it was remarkable how quickly VisiCalc "died" and was replaced. I started using Lotus in 1986, and by that time Visicalc was viewed as something from the "stone age", and I'm not really being hyperbolic. When I began using Lotus, it was a fairly polished product and I never appreciated the "growing pains" and ingenuity that it took to create an innovative, revolutionary tool like this. So, Mr. Bricklin, a very belated "thank you" for making my life so much easier!
This man is officially my favorite human being. Excel is life. You might not realize this, but Excel doubles as an ideal environment for artists to organize and manage ideas. It can even make ideas dynamic using formulas and cell references.
I was an early Visicalc user. And I bought a Radio Shack Model 1 over the Apple 2 because Visicalc on the R=Model 1 had lower case and not all caps, and twice the screen size. God it was fun learning visicalc and finding not only accounting aristhmetic, but statistics and engineering math as well. And yes, most of us early users were Visicalc fans, and angry that Dan Bricklin's name was forgotten. Good to see this acknowledgment.
I wish I could hug this man for making my life easier at some point in the past I did manage bread n butter for my family selling my 'spreadsheet skill' (if I may call it) God bless you 'sir'
My first job was in surgical research, we had vast amounts of research data to analyse. We bought Visicalc for our early Commodore PET, and that greatly speeded up our work.
How this episode did not get the views it deserves is beyond me! Dan really had gone through all the hardest work there is to make our lives as easy as possible. What a genius and outstanding contributor to the current and succeeding generation. Bless this man.
I worked at Multics, too, and worked in various departments at Digital Equipment Corporation too. I started programming in 1965 on the LINC, the first laboratory instrument computer. I achieved nothing in 40 years of creative software engineering for companies big and small because I had no ability to market my ideas like the Visicalc team did. I'm just as happy in my life, because I've helped many people through my talent as a meditation teacher. Life is so different for each of us.
I’ve noticed that computer careers are often quite short. Even extremely talented people give up at 40+ and go do other things. I’ve seen so many of my colleagues go down this path. It’s unlike most other professional careers.
@@jakelivni9576 I can't confirm that. Most of the people I worked with over my 40-year career, including myself, only moved on to another company or career when their current company went out of business. While it was going strong, computer software was one of the most stable career paths one could imagine. Today, of course, it's quite different. For flexible engineers, there's always a better company to work for. I don't see any evidence for a claim that "computer careers are short".
VisiiCalc changed my life. I randomly got a summer position with an engineering office. Used it to enter model data. I took to it like a duck in water, never looked back. Thank you. People ask what is the most important invention for so and so, I say the spreadsheet is one of those key hole inventions that opened the world up.
This guys software till this day is installed and used on virtually every machine in every business in the world, What more is there to say. I recall Lotus 123. Thanks Dan you champ
I was a computer programmer in the early 80's when i first saw a spreadsheet, and fell in love with it immediately. What a great idea! A couple of years later i worked for an engineering consulting firm in the D.C. area. Another consultant at the firm told me she was doing work for the Department of Transportation when they asked if she could put their budget breakout on a spreadsheet, which involved determining the distribution of the budget to multiple cities and states in a specific manner. She took two weeks to learn how to use the spreadsheet (I believe it was Excel) and brought the result them, entered the total budget, and they watched while it did the distribution. When it was complete, they were delighted. Then they said "Now we're going to show this to our current contracting company and ask why they're charging us $100,000 to do this."
We need a movie about this!!! No, better: a miniseries. Every episode about a product/person. As the series goes on, you discover the interaction between the different legends of the golden age of the microcomputer era. Dan Bricklin, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Dennis Ritchie, James Gosling, and many others. The rivalries, the hardware, the software, the non stop innovations, the first hackers, etc. from the 60's to the 90's. One season per decade. I mean, all these guys are billionaires with big egos, why are they not funding this????
Correction: Only some of those guys “are billionaires”. Back then, many geeks wanted to make the world a better place, not to enrich themselves unbelievably quickly. AFAIK, software couldn’t be copyrighted back then and Bricklin and Frankston did not become billionaires. And they deserve it at least as much as Jobs, where Apple is always trying to get even more of your money.
I fondly recall those days. As I got into the software business in the late 70 / early 80, I discovered that a whole bunch of Apple computers were bought specifically to run Visicalc. I also found people developing application templates for Visicalc, and making decent money doing so. A realization that changed my view of application software.
I want to say: Thank you Dan Bricklin. Through your invention, made on the year that I was born, you make our lives better everyday. Spreadsheet are so amazingly useful. Thank you.
Inspiring ! Spreadsheets made my working life from just working to so match fun. Together with my manager of the stockroom at the airport. We where at the forefront of the whole technical department in 1987. Then Lotus 123, exel, numbers. Happy memory’s making all these sheets.
BTW, I have known the name Dan Briklin since some time in the 1980s. Ditto for the fact that he dreamt up VisiCalc in order to facilitate doing Harvard Business School cases. One day in 1979, I walked past a Radio Shack store on State Street in downtown Chicago. In the display window, there were a few Trash 80s. I knew they were being manufactured, because the WSJ said so and I read the WSJ in those days. One Trash 80 in the Window was running VisiCalc. I forget whether I had ever heard of Visicalc before. A woman sales rep approached me and I asked her to tell me about VisiCalc. She knew little more than that the screen was divided into rectangular locations with numbered rows and lettered columns. Calculations were done by entering numerical data into cells. A cell could also contain text labels for rows or columns. There and then I saw that business and engineering calculations had changed forever, and that the scientific calculator was obsolete. Visicalc enabled doing in a half hour pro forma exercises that would take an entire day to write up and debug, using pencil and large tabular paper (which I bought in those days). Within 1-2 minutes, the sales rep told me that my questions went beyond her limited expertise. "Who works in this store and knows more about VisiCalc?" I asked. She replied "It's a new product and nobody here knows much about it." I told a number of my friends that "I have seen the future and it works." The Trash 80 running VisiCalc was not that future; the IBM PC running Lotus 1-2-3 was. Until about 2010, the Lotus *.WK1 format was a sort of universal format for moving data from one application to another. In 1984, I bought a Compaq, but did not buy a spreadsheet until 1988, when I bought a copy of Quattro Pro for about $40. I have done my income taxes using a spreadsheet, for every year starting with 1987. I regularly download *.xls data files from the Dept. of Commerce. The capabilities of Excel leaves some things to be desired: statistical analysis, stem and leaf diagrams, semilog and log-log graphs, box plots. A slick interface should be programmed for cross tabulations. Lotus bought VisiCalc, then retired it. In turn, Microsoft bought Lotus, then retired it. I doubt Quattro Pro exists any more. Thus Excel enjoys a planetary monopoly status.
It’s interesting to note that Mitch Kapoor, who founded Lotus Corp and who personally developed much of Lotus 1-2-3, originally worked for VisiCorp (the distributor of VisiCalc), where he developed several popular VisiCalc add-ins. His company, Lotus Corp, eventually bought the rights to VisiCalc which was failing partly due to disagreements between the developers and the distributor.
What a guy! I remember getting my copy of Visicalc in that brown binder, probably 1980. I could not believe my little Apple could be so useful. Dan is definitely someone I would love to meet.
It's an honour to hear from the inventor himself We live in a different world thanks to your endeavours Also thanks for reminding us how to challenge our perceptions to innovative and create solutions to real world problems.
Love this! I remember using SuperCalc (I think that was a later generation of VisiCalc) on a XEROX PC in 1982 as an engineering co-op student. It was pretty cool. Later used Lotus, Quattro, Excel, VisiCalc, and for fun compiled mcalc (the example spreadsheet source code provided by Borland to exercise their C complier). I now live and breathe Excel and VBA macros.
Visicalc and Supercalc are different products from different companies. Visicalc was first. I was exclusively UNIX at the time (rather predates Linux), and it had a spreadsheet program called "vc" on anything that UNIX ran on (things like PDP 11s, VAXen, Cray, Pyramids, and VM/IX on PCs or mainframes running UNIX VMs). It would have been written in C, which wasn't available on other common platforms at the time. [I'm sure the developer was heavily influenced by Bricklin's Visicalc] At some point (probably '81 or thereabouts), the vc author was smacked with a trademark threat, and wouldn't you know it he renamed it "sc". I haven't seen it in decades tho. However, both Visicalc and Supercalc were essentially killed by IBM Lotus 1-2-3 (thank ghu that POS expired), Microsoft Office and Corel. The UNIX/Linux environment gravitated towards openoffice which migrated into Sun Microsystems and later acquired by Oracle, who dropped support for it, and transferred it to the Apache Foundation. Meanwhile, LibreOffice (which is essentially plugin-compatible as it was a fork of openoffice) was developed and remains better supported/developed, and is what is mostly the "thing" for Linux/free software environments. Openoffice and Libreoffice were the only common packages that were portable across Mac, PC and Linux, and you can even run it on Androids or Raspberry Pi quite nicely. It is superbly interoperable with Microsoft Office. So I can live with Libreoffice, and accept/generate stuff Microsoft office is perfectly happy with. Best of all worlds.
@@AndreasDelleske No... Word was and is also amazing. Before windows, there was Word Perfect also good, but paled in comparison. Nothing has come close to beating Word .
I have huge respect for people like Dan Bricklin and other visionaries of that era which shaped the way we do business, communication, design, engineering etc today. The best part is these developments didn't restrict themselves to the USA, their benefits are reaped by people across the world. Thanks Dan Bricklin.
Except The British Chemical company ICI (imperial Chemical Industries) were using electronic spreadsheets 5-6 years BEFORE Visicalc ON MAINFRAMES using IBM 3270 terminals. Years before the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC were created !!!!!
Absolutely. I sold HUNDREDS of Apple IIs in sleepy Carmel, CA because of Visicalc. imagine how many copies were in universities and engineering workshops..
I am the only one who gets emotional about this video? The sounds of the audience when he talks about the commemorative plaque "OOOW"... it was very emotional
Thank you Dan Brickman, you save life, save lots of tree, your invention helps a small company like me to teach Excel and wow the audience every single week in the heart of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. Excel save life, and it only happens because VisiCal invented first.
How about that? Good for him and us. I recall first using a spreadsheet that ran on my Commodore 64. Loved it. Later I migrated to Windows and was even more impressed with the enhanced capabilities allowed by more memory space and disk space. I find this program very useful for its ease of use. And utility. Every couple of years there's an interesting enhancement. In the early 90s I read a book on AI and used a spreadsheet to program for about 95% of the various three or four types onto that spreadsheet. So Kohn, and a few others? It's been a while. I was surprised that the notions on a spreadsheet worked at all. Liked that he was or is a tinkerer.
After more than forty six years in tax and accounting and using untold numbers of spreadsheets applied to multiple scenarios I’m grateful to the man who thought enough to give us the gift of a business tool like this.
This is one video I will show to my kids. I wish I had seen it earlier. In India, we pay respect by touching the feet. I feel paying such respect to this gentlemen.
In 1984 a computer buddy and I crunched my numbers for a business proposal on a spreadsheet. We printed several versions showing profit/loss outcomes based on various factors. Did the job in an evening. No MBA, just business experience starting at ground level. My banker told me he had never seen such a comprehensive business projection from a small business proposal. We got our bank backing, and the projections proved accurate.
Thank you! Sir Dan! It is very helpful to my discussion! I am currently teaching Ms Excel to my grade 6 students.. Among the 3, (Ms word, Ms Excel and Ms Powerpoint) I really love this Ms Excel and it is amazing! Thank you for your great contribution..
The spreadsheet concept revolutionized what one person working alone could hope to accomplish. I had friends that could only afford ONE app and turned Visicalc into a "one-line-at-a-time" word processor as well as database and spreadsheet.!
I’m so happy to see that Dan quotes Steve Jobs as crediting VisiCalc with Apple’s very existence today. I’ve been saying the same thing for years. I actually interviewed with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston back then (soon after VisiCalc’s success; they did not offer me a job). AFAIK it wasn’t possible to copyright software back then and while they probably made some good money from VisiCalc, they don’t seem to have made the Zillions they probably deserve. I knew other geeks back then who did great things to make the world a better place without becoming instant multi-billionaires. So many of them produced things of gigantic importance but are anonymous unknowns today. These people are true giants of modern society. The sheer brilliance of inventing the concept of a spreadsheet and then conceiving, implementing and marketing it are still a shining model for me on how technology can develop.
Very informative! I never appreciated this program before and after watching the beginners and intermediate courses I'm excited to learn macros and start writing in VBA
Spreadsheets were, outside of games, the only unique applications that didn't follow an existing "thing", like address books, filing cabinets, typewriters, calculators, notebooks and sketchbooks. It was a very unique invention, nothing similar existed ever before. Kudos to this man, that is quite an imagination!
we never realise how important some inventions, we take for granted nowadays, were for development of business, science, industry, even everyday person managing their bills
Visi Calc on Apple II, Lotus 123 then Excel ON a PC and now Numbers on a Mac, iPad and iPhone. I did them all! Love how all my spreadsheets are now in the cloud and can be viewed and modified anywhere.
I designed a spreadsheet using Fortran in 1976. It was used internally for calculations on product costings. It's a pity I didn't have the vision to convert it into a generic product.
I remember that a few years later he brought out a program called something like Dan Bricklins Demo program that you could use to prototype your own ideas. Loved it. But not as much as my spreadsheet - and what you can do today with them is almost unbelievable
I used VisiCalc back in the day, and it was the magic many of us in the scientific community used. That seems like a very long time ago. And now we can do all of that with a TI or HP handheld calculator.
The first spreadsheet we used was called DB master and it was excellent because all the fields you could change to anything you wanted there was no limits on what you did it was not pre-described. My wife used to schedule an entire middle school. We had three Apple twos running one for each grade with two disk drives and it ran for entire weekend but when it was finished it was the best scheduling with the fewest mistakes I’ve ever had
I used to sell an Apple II to a businessman in five minutes with a simple spreadsheet Sales/Cost/Profit -> Grow 10% for one year via formula, total it, then change ONE number, the sheet updated, the businessman's eyes rolled up and out came the wallet. GREATEST APP EVER!
My first experience with spreadsheets was on an HP desktop unit running VisiCalc that had a 3 inch screen and a micro cassette. It was instrumental in propelling my career.
Back in the day I was an Excel spreadsheet wiz. Let me tell you: the best paying jobs I've ever had. long gone are the days...This was great. glad to learn the hx of spreadsheets 😊
In 1985, when I was 12, I was given an Apple II (used) and it came with lot´s of programs in 5 1/4 diskettes... two of them were Visicalc and Visiplot. That was awesome.
The spreadsheet saved so much time, and allowed presentations to be interesting. Math bored many as many did not have the intellect and tenacity till spreadsheets.
I just bought a excel to Python course to level up my excel skills….actually I just want to write programs to automate the sheets so I don’t have to do the manual work lol. Bless this man!
I built a spreadsheet program in 1978 on a Honeywell Level 6 minicomputer. Used Cobol. Built it to support finance calculations for agribusiness (Cotton growers) in Buttonwillow California.
Btw, this was before there were any micocomputers. Mini computer had three 72 inch tall cabinets. Tape drives, etc. Hard drive was the size of a washing machine.
I remember very getting an Apple IIe for my camera store shortly after it was introduced. Apple Writer, Quick File and VisiCalc were my first three programs. That computer along with both VisiCalc and Quick File did everything I wanted. My decision to buy the IIe came about after an IBM salesman, who had no clue about retail, asked me very sarcastically why I would want to do somethings. His solution was an IBM Model 34. Oh and he had no idea what software I could use to achieve my desired results. Crazy as this may sound one fairly involved spreadsheet was based on my ex banker wife's request for a spreadsheet to track various types of income (Cash, checks, different credit cards, in house credit etc). One of the main functions was providing the required data for sales tax as well as two columns which served as a error check. I later managed to convert that to Mac and then to PC. Now 40 years later I am still running that spreadsheet. For reasons I do not understand when I converted it to Mac and then Excel on PC to now Open Office I have never had to reenter a formula. Thank you for your invention.
Wow. How many software packages are still working just a few decades later? The h/w itself often no longer exists. Like the old CDC and VAX machines I got to know so well once upon a time...
I read an interview where a computer salesman was showing VisiCalc to an accountant. When the salesman showed how you could easily recompute for a different interest rate or tax bracket the accountant actually cried because it was so easy and fast.
Spreadsheets are not just for business use, but also scientific, industrial, medical, mathematical, etc. They are the extension of the calculator that NEEDED to exist! This man thought it up and I sincerely thank him for his contribution to humanity.
And this video proves much more what you said, and that people still don't understand the importance of spreadsheets yet. Just 125K views for this video... Please, come on! This man is a genius!🤦♂️
A simple spreadsheet can make a great list of things, a database of any kind, simple calculations for a common computer user. Not only business/financial stuff.
@@charliedays I agree. Probably 95% of people these days take spreadsheet software for granted while also grossly underestimating its power and capability.
@@LagMasterSam I'm aware that people overuse the "underrated" word nowadays for everything that is not considered "popular." But this is indeed an underrated invention. The masses will know about Apple's founder everywhere, but not the one who created the spreadsheet. That shows you the lack of general knowledge right there.😶
Unfortunately, they are also one of the most abused programs about. The number of times I've seen them used as a database of whatever, then they try and shuffle things around, disjointing columns of cells from others, (i.e. accidentally sorting one column only)
and ending up with a totally garbled mess. It's just not funny!
I was at the Apple Developer Conference about 10 years ago and I sat down to lunch and read the name tag of the guy across from me. Dan Bricklin. I said "THE Dan Bricklin??" I think he was pleased that I recognized the name. He modestly acknowledged his role in the history of computers, which is massive, it has to be said.
It’s always the ones like this that achieve the big things.
Similar thing happened to me at a MacWorld conference years ago, Bill Atkinson sat down behind me and we had a fun chat about fonts.
so why didn't apple have "excell"
and it was always "microsoft office for mac"?
@@christophercolumbus8944 Pretty sure everybody stole everything from Visicalc and Dan and boned him for royalties for Lotus 123 and Excel and Sheets and whatever else came after it.
That's a memory that will be with you always.😊
My first encounter with VisiCalc was on a colleague's new Apple II home computer after a pleasant dinner.
I had been tearing my hair out for a couple of days trying to balance out the component values for a switch-mode power supply. After entering the basic formulae describing my problem, I found I was able to tweak anything and quickly see the COMPLETE result. I was blown away!
BTW that 30-40 minutes work produced an end result that performed just as required.
Thank you Dan - on behalf of all engineers around the planet.
I was a kid with a IIe back in the day. I couldn't afford VisiCalc so I wrote my own. It was in BASIC and not Assembly, but it worked pretty well. My dad used it for his business because he wasn't sure that he wanted to make the investment for an "expensive" computer that used "lots of power" (the IIe would draw 75W peak - but he had mainframe fog - LOL). I kept developing for Apple, and then they started charging for their software development kit - which I couldn't afford - so I left the Apple ecosystem and never looked back. What a great presenter and what a great story. A real person with vision.
I really wanted to program for the Mac but the whole shelf of fancy white binders of secrets was priced way out of reach and I couldn't steal it, so I never bothered. The farthest I ever got was making desktop game widgets in codewarrior. Then I found Borland Turbo C++ for DOS at like, $40 in 1994. I think Apple's bizarre software ecosystem is what really killed their business from the 80s thru the late 90s. Jobs somehow made the NeXT even worse to program, and OS X still suffers from that company's mistakes.
@@stickyfox I am glad, in a way, that others share my experience. I tell this story to fanboyz occasionally and they look at me like I have two heads. I don't think they understand what the magnitude of cost was for Apple's early tools. I don't know what it is today - I've never had to go there again. But I loved their product... truly groundbreaking.
@@stickyfox I remember when Borland made Quattro-Pro but I never saw it. However, I saw Borland Quattro-Pro advertised in PC Magazine. Unnecessarily, I went to a computer school to learn an Office Technology course. There, I learned SuperCalc on an IBM PC computer. I mentioned that I went to a technical school unnecessarily, because I did not need it. I possess solid typewriting skills that should enable me to be hired in any firm and to be cross-trained as necessary. When I was disabled in 2002, I bought my own microcomputer, called Cybernet, with Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office XP Professional, with Microsoft Publisher 2002. I learned more things that I would not possibly learn in a job.
@@captainkeyboard1007 I was a BIG fan of Supercalc. It came with my used Osborne and then I bought it for my wife's Apple lle. I could maneuver around with Supercalc pretty fast.
@@nemo227 I like the microcomputer concept because creating documents and files on it affords the benefit of controlling them and working with them in many ways; and it enhances my keyboard skill, since I was an avid typist at 12 years-old. Thank you very much for tapping or even typing to me. Happy Keyboarding!
So he was a dude that was annoyed with something, so came up with his own tool to so it. I can't begin to explain how many times I have seen people use Excel to do this exact thing. I know someone who basically Excel'd himself out of a job. The spreadsheet was so thorough it turned an entire career into a 30 minute daily proccess thanks to digital spreadsheets.
This man is a hero of modern times. He has inspired so many people who didn't realise they were even inspired. It's such a basic tool anyone can use, yet deeply powerful.
I'm going to go cry for a bit because this dude is such a legend.
Sir, I’m removing your man card.
I find it interesting that throughout this talk he pushes the value of prototyping. After Visicalc his next major product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program for creating interactive prototypes and demos. I used it a lot in the late '80s to prototype new products where I worked at the time.
I remember seeing ads for Dan Bricklin's Demo in the 1980s.
Actually, that was the third product. The second was called TK!Solver, a tool for solving equations. It didn’t meet with as much success as Visicalc.
@@bunkie2100 I remember TK!Solver. The reason it wasn't a big hit is simply that the market for people who can find use for an electronic spreadsheet is *GINORMOUS.*
Not so much, however, for equation solvers.
I can't imagine the world without Dan's wits, passion and hard work. Thank you for making our lives so much easier Dan. Great respect! 🙏🙌
A true pioneer and computing legend. Thank you Dan! I learned Lotus 123 in business school and have since made my career about programming Excel. The spreadsheet truly is the killer app.
I met Dan back in 1980 when he gave a presentation at Chapman College in So. Cal. for the TRS80 users group. I was very impressed with the first "business" application for a personal computer other than a word processor. The TRS80 badly needed a powerful program like Visicalc and he delivered. I have used every spreadsheet program since. But I still have fond memories of the first for the PC.
I actually had VisiCalc running on my Apple II. In fact I still have both the computer and the software package. Today I work on extremely huge environmental research spreadsheets using Excel to number crunch millions of cells. Thank you, Dan!
My first job title in IT, at the age of 20 (late 80s), was “Spreadsheet Programmer”! That job was using Supercalc 5 on PCs, but by then I was already a spreadsheet expert, having started with VisiCalc on a TRS-80 Model 2 at the age of 13, and moving on to Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM XT during my later teens. Dan and Bob changed my life and I’m so grateful to them. I’m in my mid 50s now and still don’t take spreadsheets for granted. They’re still an wonderful tool.
Coursera sent me here. I am doing their Excel Skills for Business course from Macquarie University.
hey peter did coursera certificate value all over the world
same! :D
Same :D
Coursera may change my life because of Excel itself. I'm doing the Excel specialization as I write this comment. Did you finish your Excel courses? I hope you're doing great with those office skills.😀
Same
THANK YOU!
I started my accounting career with 13 column pads, slide rules and punch cards for computer work ( FORTRAN 2 and COBOL). I have used Visicalc, Lotus123, Quatro Pro, and Excel. Your vision has changed my life.
I didn't know who was invented the spreadsheet! This man is a genius! Thanks a lot, Sir, you will be remembered forever!
Richard Mattesich invented it... wiki him... plus where is Frankston's mention for Visicalc?
Nobody will remember him. You didn’t even know him until now.
This was the *electronic* spreadsheet. As mentioned early in the video, paper spreadsheets are hundreds of years old.
@@RonJohn63 Indeed yes, and we can still use paper spreadsheets if we don't have a computer handy.
@@nemo227 I read a little book around 50 years ago on how to make a timetable for the whole school, to make sure each class had a teacher and a room for each period. The deputy head was supposed to start in his summer holiday by spreading a sheet out on his living room floor ...
over the years - i've marveled at Excel and the idea of the spreadsheet - amazed that something as narrowly focused as a accountant's spreadsheet - could turn into such an all powerful tool - - i never knew who came up with the idea - Dan Bricklin has every right to feel as proud of his little baby as any other inventor - considering how much and how many ways its descendants are being used - he has without doubt played in as big part in shaping today's modern world as Gates & Jobs etc
I was a Fortune 500 corporate accountant and one of the first gen of "spreadsheet jockeys" who used "Lotus 1-2-3", essentially the software that "absorbed or killed" VisiCalc, take your pick.
Lotus is also, of course, now long gone, killed off by Excel. It can't be expressed strongly enough how electronic spreadsheets revolutionized business productivity. I was able to shorten
our monthly accounting closing cycle from 4 days to 2 by directly downloading data from our mainframe into a "multi-dimensional" spreadsheet that I designed and customized. This allowed for
instantaneous updating and adjustments on the fly, whereas prior to that all input was done via "dumb terminals" directly into the mainframe on a "captive" financial program that was
not "customizable". Made my job a heck of a lot easier, although it was surprising, or maybe not, how many feathers I ruffled when I implemented it. People don't like change, especially when
you show them up. Looking back upon this time, it was remarkable how quickly VisiCalc "died" and was replaced. I started using Lotus in 1986, and by that time Visicalc was viewed as something from the "stone age", and I'm not really being hyperbolic. When I began using Lotus, it was a fairly polished product and I never appreciated the "growing pains" and ingenuity that it took to create an innovative, revolutionary tool like this. So, Mr. Bricklin, a very belated "thank you" for making my life so much easier!
I feel fortunate to be old enough to identify with every element of this amazing story. What a long way we've come in the computer age.
Mr. Dan you are a great man. God bless you
This man is officially my favorite human being. Excel is life.
You might not realize this, but Excel doubles as an ideal environment for artists to organize and manage ideas. It can even make ideas dynamic using formulas and cell references.
Then I must be dead since I don't use it. And any other electronic spreadsheet.
An imaginative person with a spreadsheet can do the most amazing things...
I was an early Visicalc user. And I bought a Radio Shack Model 1 over the Apple 2 because Visicalc on the R=Model 1 had lower case and not all caps, and twice the screen size. God it was fun learning visicalc and finding not only accounting aristhmetic, but statistics and engineering math as well. And yes, most of us early users were Visicalc fans, and angry that Dan Bricklin's name was forgotten. Good to see this acknowledgment.
Did you move to Lotus 123 too? As most people did?
I wish I could hug this man for making my life easier
at some point in the past I did manage bread n butter for my family selling my 'spreadsheet skill' (if I may call it)
God bless you 'sir'
My first job was in surgical research, we had vast amounts of research data to analyse. We bought Visicalc for our early Commodore PET, and that greatly speeded up our work.
How this episode did not get the views it deserves is beyond me! Dan really had gone through all the hardest work there is to make our lives as easy as possible. What a genius and outstanding contributor to the current and succeeding generation. Bless this man.
Dan Bricklin, your work is priceless. Thank you very very much!! You are more than Nobel Prize.
Thank you Dan,
I used Visicalc back in '82 on a Commodore Pet.
You are a legend.
I worked at Multics, too, and worked in various departments at Digital Equipment Corporation too. I started programming in 1965 on the LINC, the first laboratory instrument computer. I achieved nothing in 40 years of creative software engineering for companies big and small because I had no ability to market my ideas like the Visicalc team did. I'm just as happy in my life, because I've helped many people through my talent as a meditation teacher. Life is so different for each of us.
I’ve noticed that computer careers are often quite short. Even extremely talented people give up at 40+ and go do other things. I’ve seen so many of my colleagues go down this path. It’s unlike most other professional careers.
@@jakelivni9576 I can't confirm that. Most of the people I worked with over my 40-year career, including myself, only moved on to another company or career when their current company went out of business. While it was going strong, computer software was one of the most stable career paths one could imagine. Today, of course, it's quite different. For flexible engineers, there's always a better company to work for. I don't see any evidence for a claim that "computer careers are short".
A great technology/history lesson from the actual person who actually did it... Thanks TED.
VisiiCalc changed my life. I randomly got a summer position with an engineering office. Used it to enter model data. I took to it like a duck in water, never looked back. Thank you.
People ask what is the most important invention for so and so, I say the spreadsheet is one of those key hole inventions that opened the world up.
This guys software till this day is installed and used on virtually every machine in every business in the world, What more is there to say. I recall Lotus 123. Thanks Dan you champ
I was a computer programmer in the early 80's when i first saw a spreadsheet, and fell in love with it immediately. What a great idea! A couple of years later i worked for an engineering consulting firm in the D.C. area. Another consultant at the firm told me she was doing work for the Department of Transportation when they asked if she could put their budget breakout on a spreadsheet, which involved determining the distribution of the budget to multiple cities and states in a specific manner. She took two weeks to learn how to use the spreadsheet (I believe it was Excel) and brought the result them, entered the total budget, and they watched while it did the distribution. When it was complete, they were delighted. Then they said "Now we're going to show this to our current contracting company and ask why they're charging us $100,000 to do this."
We need a movie about this!!!
No, better: a miniseries. Every episode about a product/person. As the series goes on, you discover the interaction between the different legends of the golden age of the microcomputer era. Dan Bricklin, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Dennis Ritchie, James Gosling, and many others.
The rivalries, the hardware, the software, the non stop innovations, the first hackers, etc. from the 60's to the 90's. One season per decade.
I mean, all these guys are billionaires with big egos, why are they not funding this????
Correction: Only some of those guys “are billionaires”. Back then, many geeks wanted to make the world a better place, not to enrich themselves unbelievably quickly. AFAIK, software couldn’t be copyrighted back then and Bricklin and Frankston did not become billionaires. And they deserve it at least as much as Jobs, where Apple is always trying to get even more of your money.
@@jakelivni9576I meant: let's flatter the egos of the ones that are billionaires, so THEY will fund the movie/series
A brilliant mind, Dan Bricklin. God bless you!
I fondly recall those days. As I got into the software business in the late 70 / early 80, I discovered that a whole bunch of Apple computers were bought specifically to run Visicalc. I also found people developing application templates for Visicalc, and making decent money doing so. A realization that changed my view of application software.
Hello dear tell me more if you don’t mind..
I want to say: Thank you Dan Bricklin. Through your invention, made on the year that I was born, you make our lives better everyday. Spreadsheet are so amazingly useful. Thank you.
Inspiring ! Spreadsheets made my working life from just working to so match fun. Together with my manager of the stockroom at the airport. We where at the forefront of the whole technical department in 1987. Then Lotus 123, exel, numbers. Happy memory’s making all these sheets.
BTW, I have known the name Dan Briklin since some time in the 1980s. Ditto for the fact that he dreamt up VisiCalc in order to facilitate doing Harvard Business School cases.
One day in 1979, I walked past a Radio Shack store on State Street in downtown Chicago. In the display window, there were a few Trash 80s. I knew they were being manufactured, because the WSJ said so and I read the WSJ in those days. One Trash 80 in the Window was running VisiCalc. I forget whether I had ever heard of Visicalc before. A woman sales rep approached me and I asked her to tell me about VisiCalc. She knew little more than that the screen was divided into rectangular locations with numbered rows and lettered columns. Calculations were done by entering numerical data into cells. A cell could also contain text labels for rows or columns. There and then I saw that business and engineering calculations had changed forever, and that the scientific calculator was obsolete. Visicalc enabled doing in a half hour pro forma exercises that would take an entire day to write up and debug, using pencil and large tabular paper (which I bought in those days).
Within 1-2 minutes, the sales rep told me that my questions went beyond her limited expertise. "Who works in this store and knows more about VisiCalc?" I asked. She replied "It's a new product and nobody here knows much about it." I told a number of my friends that "I have seen the future and it works."
The Trash 80 running VisiCalc was not that future; the IBM PC running Lotus 1-2-3 was. Until about 2010, the Lotus *.WK1 format was a sort of universal format for moving data from one application to another. In 1984, I bought a Compaq, but did not buy a spreadsheet until 1988, when I bought a copy of Quattro Pro for about $40. I have done my income taxes using a spreadsheet, for every year starting with 1987. I regularly download *.xls data files from the Dept. of Commerce.
The capabilities of Excel leaves some things to be desired: statistical analysis, stem and leaf diagrams, semilog and log-log graphs, box plots. A slick interface should be programmed for cross tabulations.
Lotus bought VisiCalc, then retired it. In turn, Microsoft bought Lotus, then retired it. I doubt Quattro Pro exists any more. Thus Excel enjoys a planetary monopoly status.
Quattro Pro and Ace database were two early bug-free and easy to use business programs that I got lots of use out of.
It’s interesting to note that Mitch Kapoor, who founded Lotus Corp and who personally developed much of Lotus 1-2-3, originally worked for VisiCorp (the distributor of VisiCalc), where he developed several popular VisiCalc add-ins. His company, Lotus Corp, eventually bought the rights to VisiCalc which was failing partly due to disagreements between the developers and the distributor.
What a guy! I remember getting my copy of Visicalc in that brown binder, probably 1980. I could not believe my little Apple could be so useful. Dan is definitely someone I would love to meet.
It's an honour to hear from the inventor himself
We live in a different world thanks to your endeavours
Also thanks for reminding us how to challenge our perceptions to innovative and create solutions to real world problems.
Why does this not have way higher views? This is gold dust. You will be surprised at how young children aged 11 to 13 love the logic of spreadsheets!
Love this! I remember using SuperCalc (I think that was a later generation of VisiCalc) on a XEROX PC in 1982 as an engineering co-op student. It was pretty cool. Later used Lotus, Quattro, Excel, VisiCalc, and for fun compiled mcalc (the example spreadsheet source code provided by Borland to exercise their C complier). I now live and breathe Excel and VBA macros.
Visicalc and Supercalc are different products from different companies. Visicalc was first.
I was exclusively UNIX at the time (rather predates Linux), and it had a spreadsheet program called "vc" on anything that UNIX ran on (things like PDP 11s, VAXen, Cray, Pyramids, and VM/IX on PCs or mainframes running UNIX VMs). It would have been written in C, which wasn't available on other common platforms at the time. [I'm sure the developer was heavily influenced by Bricklin's Visicalc]
At some point (probably '81 or thereabouts), the vc author was smacked with a trademark threat, and wouldn't you know it he renamed it "sc". I haven't seen it in decades tho.
However, both Visicalc and Supercalc were essentially killed by IBM Lotus 1-2-3 (thank ghu that POS expired), Microsoft Office and Corel. The UNIX/Linux environment gravitated towards openoffice which migrated into Sun Microsystems and later acquired by Oracle, who dropped support for it, and transferred it to the Apache Foundation. Meanwhile, LibreOffice (which is essentially plugin-compatible as it was a fork of openoffice) was developed and remains better supported/developed, and is what is mostly the "thing" for Linux/free software environments.
Openoffice and Libreoffice were the only common packages that were portable across Mac, PC and Linux, and you can even run it on Androids or Raspberry Pi quite nicely. It is superbly interoperable with Microsoft Office. So I can live with Libreoffice, and accept/generate stuff Microsoft office is perfectly happy with. Best of all worlds.
Electronic Spreadsheets specially MS Excel is one of the most amazing Business Applications which both Small and Large Businesses use 24/7
It may be the only good product Microsoft ever delivered.
@@AndreasDelleske No... Word was and is also amazing. Before windows, there was Word Perfect also good, but paled in comparison. Nothing has come close to beating Word .
@@JM-ig4ed Until you try to make pictures and footnotes appear on the pages they belong...
He should get a Nobel or something similar.
Johnfortich Vista Not a Jew not qualified for Nobel
yes
Amen John !
@@mayank25121990 lmao Jewish Nobel Prize winners only consists ~20% in total.
Absolutely.
Didn’t know I had a hero until now but your invention has saved me countless hours over my working life! Thank you Dan!
This man is a hero.
I have huge respect for people like Dan Bricklin and other visionaries of that era which shaped the way we do business, communication, design, engineering etc today. The best part is these developments didn't restrict themselves to the USA, their benefits are reaped by people across the world. Thanks Dan Bricklin.
Except The British Chemical company ICI (imperial Chemical Industries) were using electronic spreadsheets 5-6 years BEFORE Visicalc ON MAINFRAMES using IBM 3270 terminals. Years before the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC were created !!!!!
What a valuable contribution to society.
With thanks, the business world.
The man is a legend. Visicalc was truly a groundbreaking application that in many ways launched the personal computing revolution.
Absolutely. I sold HUNDREDS of Apple IIs in sleepy Carmel, CA because of Visicalc. imagine how many copies were in universities and engineering workshops..
I am the only one who gets emotional about this video? The sounds of the audience when he talks about the commemorative plaque "OOOW"... it was very emotional
what a guy. a new hero. thank you
Thank you Dan Brickman, you save life, save lots of tree, your invention helps a small company like me to teach Excel and wow the audience every single week in the heart of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. Excel save life, and it only happens because VisiCal invented first.
Hello dear tell me more if you don’t mind
This dude helped me immensely without we ever know each other. Thanks.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻We owe everything to inventors
I actually applauded at the end... and then realized it was a RUclips video and I was sitting all alone. ;-)
How about that? Good for him and us. I recall first using a spreadsheet that ran on my Commodore 64. Loved it. Later I migrated to Windows and was even more impressed with the enhanced capabilities allowed by more memory space and disk space. I find this program very useful for its ease of use. And utility. Every couple of years there's an interesting enhancement. In the early 90s I read a book on AI and used a spreadsheet to program for about 95% of the various three or four types onto that spreadsheet. So Kohn, and a few others? It's been a while. I was surprised that the notions on a spreadsheet worked at all. Liked that he was or is a tinkerer.
After more than forty six years in tax and accounting and using untold numbers of spreadsheets applied to multiple scenarios I’m grateful to the man who thought enough to give us the gift of a business tool like this.
Finally an actual good TED Talk.
there is ted talk by Linus Torvald... I personally love that Ted talk. I would recommend that to you as well
This is one video I will show to my kids. I wish I had seen it earlier. In India, we pay respect by touching the feet. I feel paying such respect to this gentlemen.
Hail Bricklin!
My first spreadsheet was the Twin 123, a clone of the Lotus 123.
I have used spreadsheets constantly since 1986.
Thanks Dan.
In 1984 a computer buddy and I crunched my numbers for a business proposal on a spreadsheet. We printed several versions showing profit/loss outcomes based on various factors. Did the job in an evening. No MBA, just business experience starting at ground level. My banker told me he had never seen such a comprehensive business projection from a small business proposal. We got our bank backing, and the projections proved accurate.
Yay for Dan! I was using Visicalc on the Apple II in 1980 - 1981!
Glad YT showed me this. Thx Dan, Bob & Mitch for making the best software ever!
- I just wanted to be in this audience to applaud this man @11:25
Thank you! Sir Dan! It is very helpful to my discussion! I am currently teaching Ms Excel to my grade 6 students.. Among the 3, (Ms word, Ms Excel and Ms Powerpoint) I really love this Ms Excel and it is amazing! Thank you for your great contribution..
The spreadsheet concept revolutionized what one person working alone could hope to accomplish. I had friends that could only afford ONE app and turned Visicalc into a "one-line-at-a-time" word processor as well as database and spreadsheet.!
Argh!!! It's *MS* not Ms!!
This guy is an absolute legend. His concept is still going strong.
I’m so happy to see that Dan quotes Steve Jobs as crediting VisiCalc with Apple’s very existence today. I’ve been saying the same thing for years. I actually interviewed with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston back then (soon after VisiCalc’s success; they did not offer me a job). AFAIK it wasn’t possible to copyright software back then and while they probably made some good money from VisiCalc, they don’t seem to have made the Zillions they probably deserve. I knew other geeks back then who did great things to make the world a better place without becoming instant multi-billionaires. So many of them produced things of gigantic importance but are anonymous unknowns today. These people are true giants of modern society. The sheer brilliance of inventing the concept of a spreadsheet and then conceiving, implementing and marketing it are still a shining model for me on how technology can develop.
Very informative! I never appreciated this program before and after watching the beginners and intermediate courses I'm excited to learn macros and start writing in VBA
How nice to see and hear the inventor of electronic spreadsheets. He really made an epic program.
I use some sort of spreadsheet almost daily for work and personal use. Thanks Dan
Bravo Dan Bricklin. It is a joy to know of you. You changed the course of history, America 🇺🇸 and the World. 🌎
Spreadsheets were, outside of games, the only unique applications that didn't follow an existing "thing", like address books, filing cabinets, typewriters, calculators, notebooks and sketchbooks. It was a very unique invention, nothing similar existed ever before. Kudos to this man, that is quite an imagination!
we never realise how important some inventions, we take for granted nowadays, were for development of business, science, industry, even everyday person managing their bills
THANK YOU VERY MUCH DAN BRICKLIN
What a breaking invention. Deep respect 🙏
This is an inspiring Ted Talk!
I salute to you sir...the whole world is indebted to you...through your invention businesses grown and succeed...thank sir...
Visi Calc on Apple II, Lotus 123 then Excel ON a PC and now Numbers on a Mac, iPad and iPhone. I did them all! Love how all my spreadsheets are now in the cloud and can be viewed and modified anywhere.
I love this guys sense of humour! Watch towards the end....division isn't working yet... a great quote, from a visionary man.
I designed a spreadsheet using Fortran in 1976. It was used internally for calculations on product costings.
It's a pity I didn't have the vision to convert it into a generic product.
You are old, sir. :)
This is so wonderful. Thanks
The last sentence saved it all.
I remember that a few years later he brought out a program called something like Dan Bricklins Demo program that you could use to prototype your own ideas. Loved it. But not as much as my spreadsheet - and what you can do today with them is almost unbelievable
Hello dear tell me more if you don’t mind
I used VisiCalc back in the day, and it was the magic many of us in the scientific community used. That seems like a very long time ago. And now we can do all of that with a TI or HP handheld calculator.
Hello dear tell me more if you don’t mind.
The first spreadsheet we used was called DB master and it was excellent because all the fields you could change to anything you wanted there was no limits on what you did it was not pre-described. My wife used to schedule an entire middle school. We had three Apple twos running one for each grade with two disk drives and it ran for entire weekend but when it was finished it was the best scheduling with the fewest mistakes I’ve ever had
I used to sell an Apple II to a businessman in five minutes with a simple spreadsheet Sales/Cost/Profit -> Grow 10% for one year via formula, total it, then change ONE number, the sheet updated, the businessman's eyes rolled up and out came the wallet.
GREATEST APP EVER!
My first experience with spreadsheets was on an HP desktop unit running VisiCalc that had a 3 inch screen and a micro cassette. It was instrumental in propelling my career.
Back in the day I was an Excel spreadsheet wiz. Let me tell you: the best paying jobs I've ever had. long gone are the days...This was great. glad to learn the hx of spreadsheets 😊
Stay healthy and Happy ..Dan ! always share your wisdom !
It is crazy how little views this video has for such an important invention.
Fantastic video, really interesting to see the thought process around how to label cells - what a stroke of genius that was!
I wonder if he was a chess player? That's how they label the squares on the board.
In 1985, when I was 12, I was given an Apple II (used) and it came with lot´s of programs in 5 1/4 diskettes... two of them were Visicalc and Visiplot. That was awesome.
Thank you Mr. Bricklin. I use spreadsheets every day at work, and every payday to manage my finances.
The spreadsheet saved so much time, and allowed presentations to be interesting. Math bored many as many did not have the intellect and tenacity till spreadsheets.
Hello dear tell me more if you don’t mind.
I just bought a excel to Python course to level up my excel skills….actually I just want to write programs to automate the sheets so I don’t have to do the manual work lol. Bless this man!
I built a spreadsheet program in 1978 on a Honeywell Level 6 minicomputer. Used Cobol. Built it to support finance calculations for agribusiness (Cotton growers) in Buttonwillow California.
Btw, this was before there were any micocomputers. Mini computer had three 72 inch tall cabinets. Tape drives, etc. Hard drive was the size of a washing machine.
I remember very getting an Apple IIe for my camera store shortly after it was introduced. Apple Writer, Quick File and VisiCalc were my first three programs. That computer along with both VisiCalc and Quick File did everything I wanted. My decision to buy the IIe came about after an IBM salesman, who had no clue about retail, asked me very sarcastically why I would want to do somethings. His solution was an IBM Model 34. Oh and he had no idea what software I could use to achieve my desired results.
Crazy as this may sound one fairly involved spreadsheet was based on my ex banker wife's request for a spreadsheet to track various types of income (Cash, checks, different credit cards, in house credit etc). One of the main functions was providing the required data for sales tax as well as two columns which served as a error check. I later managed to convert that to Mac and then to PC. Now 40 years later I am still running that spreadsheet. For reasons I do not understand when I converted it to Mac and then Excel on PC to now Open Office I have never had to reenter a formula. Thank you for your invention.
Wow. How many software packages are still working just a few decades later? The h/w itself often no longer exists. Like the old CDC and VAX machines I got to know so well once upon a time...
Excel VBA has paid my mortgage for 20 years, thanks a million 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Probably one of the most used applications ever designed. Used by school kids to scientists, for simple lists to engineering design. Truly incredible.
Hello dear tell me more if you don’t mind
If there ever was a Mt. Rushmore of computing pioneers, Bricklin's mug should be featured front and center!
I read an interview where a computer salesman was showing VisiCalc to an accountant. When the salesman showed how you could easily recompute for a different interest rate or tax bracket the accountant actually cried because it was so easy and fast.
Thank you Dan ! I did use Visicalc ! This was well before Quattro Pro and Excel.