Visicalc on the Apple Ii

>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).

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app

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.

The quality of documentation is something I haven’t 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. It’s 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 it’s all keyboard based. Is there something like vim but for spreadsheets?

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.

And also surprisingly Osborne-1s with SuperCalc (mostly to Texan oilmen working in Indonesia who were in Singapore for R&R, and who needed number crunching out in the field)

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.

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.

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.

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.

- Steve Jobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o