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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML VisiCalc on the Apple II
specialist wrote 45 min ago:
Terrific, fun article. So many memories.
I worked at an Apple dealer as a kid. Was present for the Apple II
Plus, Apple //e, ProDrive, Apple ///, Lisa, DEC Rainbow, dBase,
Wizardry, Ultima. One of my gopher tasks was to fetch literature and
inventory (mostly Z80 SoftCards) from "MicroSoft", just a few blocks
away (downtown Bellevue).
My dad was a Symphony superfan. Created a nifty tax filing program,
maintained for a few years, shared with friends & family. Before
shareware became a thing. Since, I always equated databases and
sheetsheets. (Still have PTSD caused by Microsoft's series of kludges.
ODBC, ODE (?), ADO,...)
One day, dad came home with BoeingCalc. IIRC, the first commercial 3D
spreadsheet. Alas, Boeing lost money on every sale, and wouldn't or
couldn't spin it off as a separate biz unit.
IIRC, MicroRIM (first commercial relational database for PCs?) was
started by former Boeing people. Back then, Boeing had to create
internal tools for themselves, so did some pretty cool stuff.
ChristopherDrum wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
Author here. Thanks to OP for linking to my recent post and to the HN
community for visiting and sharing their personal anecdotes. Iâm glad
to see a continuing shared interest in these classic productivity
tools. I donât blog about games at all, just retro productivity
software, so if that floats your boat you may enjoy the other posts on
my site.
d_sem wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
This was before my time but I appreciate the write up and the nostalgia
from folks in this thread.
My take away was that VisiCalc was a fairly straight forward
technological problem, but a 10,000x+ impact idea. I feel like there
are still idea's like this waiting in the shadows to be discovered by a
lowly undergrad somewhere who tries something unique for the first
time.
phendrenad2 wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
One wonders if there are still features of these old keyboard-based
spreadsheet programs that never made the jump to Excel and the like.
ChristopherDrum wrote 16 hours 59 min ago:
Author here. That is kind of one of my reasons for starting the blog,
is to see what may have been forgotten in old productivity software.
andreybaskov wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
I bought a used VisiCalc box on eBay to run it on my restored Apple II
and experience what it was like to use it back in a day on original
hardware.
The quality of documentation is something I havenât see in the last
decade or two. It comes in a binder, well organized, thought out with
good examples and no expectation of prior knowledge. Itâs a joy to
read. The only documentation I read thats better than this was the
original Apple II Basic manual.
And the best part is itâs all keyboard based. Is there something like
vim but for spreadsheets?
ChristopherDrum wrote 15 hours 40 min ago:
Author here. Yes, Iâm glad someone agrees with my assessment on the
documentation quality. It pulls off a pretty amazing hat-trick,
considering it was the first exposure anyone had with such a program.
`sc` is the only option Iâm aware of that is like a âspreadsheet
vimâ though there are likely others.
Interestingly enough, the original name of sc was . . .
wait for it . . .
vc
buescher wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
Lotus was great from the keyboard. People who are very good at Excel
do use the keyboard heavily and it's a joy to watch.
listenallyall wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
Unless they removed it in recent releases, Excel has an option to
mimic Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts.
c22 wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
There's VisiData [ [1] ]
HTML [1]: https://www.visidata.org/
andreybaskov wrote 19 hours 20 min ago:
Thanks, that looks interesting. It looks more like a data grid, but
anything that has keyboard shortcuts to work with data is awesome.
Iâll give it a try.
kragen wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
VisiData isn't a spreadsheet, even though it looks like one.
c22 wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
True, but it might scratch some of the same itches.
nickdothutton wrote 1 day ago:
Hard to over state how important Visicalc was. I was a Supercalc user
under CP/M, really great software. "A superpower" in its day.
wang_li wrote 1 day ago:
It's not particularly subject related, but that CRT filter applied to a
4x pixel multiplied image is just wrong.
ChristopherDrum wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
Author here. Sorry to disappoint you.
satisfice wrote 1 day ago:
What about the Mac? In 1988 I was using something that must have been
called MacCalc or similar. It was neither Excel nor Lotus.
hggh wrote 8 hours 42 min ago:
This?
HTML [1]: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/71070-maccalc
satisfice wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
Could have been that. Whatever it was, it was standard software in
use at Apple at the time. We were all using it.
ChristopherDrum wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
Author here. If not AppleWorks, Multiplan, Excel, or Lotus, then
possibly âFull Impact?â
danieltrembath wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
AppleWorks/ClarisWorks?
SoftTalker wrote 20 hours 44 min ago:
Maybe MultiPlan? Early Microsoft spreadsheet (before Excel) that ran
on a number of microcomputers.
kyledrake wrote 1 day ago:
One of the highlights of my work in tech was meeting someone I had read
about in many computing history books, Bob Frankston, who dropped in
for the Web 1.0 Conf at MIT Media Lab years ago. I was indifferent to
the coffee choice at the event so I grabbed light toast, but he
preferred dark roast coffee and politely but intently requested dark
roast, so the next day I made sure we had both. That's where I learned
that I preferred it too and I've been drinking dark roast ever since.
Thanks Bob.
I wish I was in the room when he tried to demo Visicalc to the Atari
developers, IIRC, the Atari documentary implied that a lot of them
showed up to the demo stoned and were perhaps a little confused why
they were being shown the demo.
joezydeco wrote 1 day ago:
I had to beg to get the family to buy an Apple ][, but then someone
handed me a pirated copy of VisiCalc and my dad wouldn't let it go. He
was a recently minted MBA that had spent years grinding with SPSS and
VisiCalc was a magical thing.
After that we always had nice printers and lots of storage as he
started a consultancy and drove it all from that Apple ][. He even
wrote documents in the spreadsheet, he refused all attempts to move to
a proper word processor. Lots of fond memories there.
hbn wrote 1 day ago:
"If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer, you'd be
interviewing somebody else right now!"
- Steve Jobs
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o
catMotors wrote 1 day ago:
Borland Quattro Pro Spreadsheet
40+ years ago..
Great keyboard recorder language! Edit to branch, compare, move
entries, auto mixing
randomly placed consecutive primes in a matrix array, where sums on
columns, or products on columns, so all columns would become
semi-equal, I recall often surprising difference plus/minus 1 for sums.
Like the 1st pass of a magic square.
It was fun to make, and fun to watch, much slower back then.
satisfice wrote 1 day ago:
I loved Quattro Pro. Version 1 was very good.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
Forgotten: WingZ [1]. In an era when they were trying to combine
spreadsheet + charts + database + who-the-hell-knows-what-else.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informix_Wingz
buescher wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
Wingz, in its brief era, was really nice. In-sheet graphics before
Excel had them, and more intuitive too.
tasty_freeze wrote 1 day ago:
In the summer of 1981, I was a high school student who had been
programming in BASIC for three years. I got a summer job at a company
to write some utility programs in BASIC on an Apple II.
One program tracked all the land leasing they did, including location,
date of expiration, number of square feet, cost/sqft. Once that was
done I did some other programs. I went off to college and brought the
program listings (in dot matrix greenbar paper) with me. Oh, I was paid
$5/hour, which I just looked up would be $17.81/hour now. Then again, I
burned up $5 gas and two hours of driving a day, and $5 at the
cafeteria.
Every so often I'd get a call from the guy who used the program asking
for a fix or enhancement. He didn't know how to program, and I didn't
have a computer, so I'd just dictate "between lines 1280 and 1290, type
"1291 IF F2 < 100 THEN 1320:F2=B2+1" or whatever.
I went back to the same job the next summer and they had visicalc. I
wrote everything as visicalc spreadsheets on the same Apple II, and
taught the user how it all worked. It took 10% of the time and I never
got calls again -- the user could figure out how to tweak things.
The main problem was the Apple II could only produce 40 columns of
text, which really sucked. You could buy a card which could put out
80x24 but for some reason they didn't want to spend the money even
though it seemed like it would have paid for itself in faster
navigation.
BirAdam wrote 1 day ago:
If you're interested in the history of VisiCalc:
HTML [1]: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app
pinewurst wrote 22 hours 19 min ago:
HTML [1]: http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm
sehugg wrote 1 day ago:
Sometimes I wonder if instead of struggling with office suites, I'd be
better off running VisiCalc in an emulator. Low memory usage, high
portability, and you know they're not going to change the UI on you.
ChristopherDrum wrote 12 hours 47 min ago:
Author here.
I address data portability in a step-by-step process in the blog
post. Long story short, itâs too much hassle while still being
imperfect. If data sharing is important, itâs not a good choice. If
youâre content to build a little spreadsheet that exists solely
within the VisiCalc and VisiClone world, then it might suffice. I
suspect the average user has higher baseline expectations than
VisiCalc can deliver. You need to really try it out yourself (Dan
Bricklin has the 80-column DOS version for free on his site) and see
what it lacks firsthand.
II2II wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
It depends upon your needs, but the over simplified answer is:
probably not.
I'm not talking about the over all design philosophy behind such old
software. It may be better for getting things done in terms of the
interface and, as you mentioned, there's high portability. By
portability, I assume you mean you can run it on anything that has an
emulator for it.
The trouble is how tied to the hardware it was. For example: 80
column mode was limited to particular video cards, and support didn't
include the 80 column support found on later Apple II's. Have extra
memory (such as an emulated 128 kB Apple IIe, so again were talking
about very common hardware)? Well, you're stuck to the 64 kB (or
less) of an Apple II or II+. Given that you have to restart the
program to reclaim unused memory, this may be a bigger deal than
anticipated.
Such old software is finicky. Even Lotus 1-2-3 on a PC emulator would
have its quirks, albeit not to the same extreme.
krazykringle wrote 21 hours 41 min ago:
Consider âscâ - dates from 1981, still actively maintained. [1]
(active fork) [2] [3] Installable on mac and unix as âsc-imâ
HTML [1]: https://github.com/n-t-roff/sc
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)
HTML [3]: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/resolute/en/man1/sc-im....
rjsw wrote 1 day ago:
Software optimized for early model Macintosh computers runs well on
later ones.
WriteNow on a Quadra 950 is very fast, I don't have a spreadsheet
application from the same era.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
Or just an earlier version of Excel.
sehugg wrote 1 day ago:
I guess whichever has the most parseable format and plays nice with
virtual printer drivers. And when sharing a spreadsheet with
someone, you can share the entire spreadsheet application software,
no incompatibilities :)
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
One of my most vivid memories from youth is of the accountant who
pulled up to a computer store I was hanging out in and announced to the
clerk:
>I want a Visicalc.
After explaining that he would need a computer to run it and that the
guy did not yet own one, the clerk then proceeded to put together a
purchase which was not quite one (or more! Dual-Disk Drive setup) of
every Apple product in the store, incl. a 132 column printer and an 80
col. display.
After ringing it up (for which the guy wrote out a check), I was
enlisted to help load things into his black Trans Am and he drove off
into the sunset.
The thing which most clearly echoed that after was using Lotus Improv
on a NeXT Cube --- these days, I either use Google Docs, or pyspread
--- really wish Flexisheet would compile under GNUstep or that there
was some nice, elegant, multi-dimensional spreadsheet option with a
clear, easy-to-understand formula pane (which was the big advantage of
Improv --- all formulae were gathered in one place).
WalterBright wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
So much opportunity I missed.
bayouborne wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
It's hard to over-estimate the tectonic impact the idea of
spreadsheet had on the microcomputer scene at the time. Overnight
'programming' came to the masses. Someone with a problem (almost any
kind of problem, scientific, financial, statistical, etc) could sit
down, and easily start describing sequential flow, numerical
manipulation and a ton of other things. It was the second coming of
the International Business Machine.
bombcar wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
The spreadsheet literally changed how business was run, and
arguably a bunch of financial advances after it were directly
because of it.
Being able to see values recalculated instantly was earthshattering
in a way that even the Internet really wasn't.
NoSalt wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
Black TransAm, you say??? "Smokey and the Bandit IV: The Bandit Does
Your Taxes"
spankibalt wrote 1 day ago:
> Lotus Improv
A story that's not complete without Javelin (Plus) [1], a similar
program with more longevity, and popularity in its particular niche,
but much less fame.
1. [ [1] ]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, ages ago, when doing the composition for an encyclopedia I
pointed out its omission, but unfortunately, things were too far
along for it to be added.
Almost mentioned that I can't get anyone to buy me a license for
Quantrix Financial Modeler either, but that felt a bit on-the-nose.
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