Apostrophe — Bert Collins’s Blog

Dan Bricklin

Slashdot today links to John Dvorak on the the 30th Anniversary of VisiCalc, the original computer spreadsheet program. When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc for the Apple II in 1979, it was, as Robert X. Cringely noted,

the last element required to turn the microcomputer from a hobbyist’s toy into a business machine.

In retrospect,  it was an astonishing invention. 27,520 bytes of code, running in 32k of RAM, it was about one-thousandth the size of the current version of Excel and had about 90%  of the functionality most people use today. Dan Bricklin offers a free download for Windows PCs.

Tags: history, technology

This entry was posted on January 13, 2009 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.