But fortunately the mood in Cambridge was decidedly different from that in Washington.
Yes, there was this opportunity of coming from the computer world and knowing this other, working world: I and others felt that we could bring something from one to the other. There was sort of an imperative there that you can improve the world by taking from something that's not so obvious and moving it to [the mainstream]. The view was, if you don't do it, who will? Nowadays everybody will do it, but in those days, that wasn't the case. Computers were seen as strange and weird things, meant for people in lab coats.
And yet VisiCalc was originally seen as a viable product for the consumer market.
Yes, Dan Fylstra, who headed up Personal Software, the company that published [distributed] VisiCalc, was looking for a program that could balance checkbooks. Of course, it turns out in hindsight that one doesn't want a checkbook program, one wants a "how do you pay the bills easy" program, and certainly [personal-finance software maker] Intuit understands that. But the fact that the spreadsheet could be used as a checkbook got some early attention, although it soon became apparent that it could do lots of other things, and that it was suited to professional accountants and businesspeople, not just home users.
In fact, some aspects of its basic design presume a business use?
Yes. For example, if you ask why the early versions had 63 columns, it's because if you're doing material resource planning of any sort—any kind of production planning—it's done on a weekly basis. You like to do things on a weekly basis for a year or beyond, so despite limited computer memory, we decided on 63. And it had the look-up function because Bob [Frankston] was trying to do taxes with it, and for taxes you need to be able to do the look-up types of stuff. We used decimal arithmetic in large part so it would round in the same way handheld calculators did, and we put in the ability to draw a horizontal line because you need them to create balance sheets and similar reports.
Looking back, is there anything that you wish you had done differently?
Well, if we had had a better business relationship with our publisher, we might still be dominant now, but a lot of people can say that. Also, at the time you really had to write software for specific computers; you couldn't write a fast program that would run on everything, and we wrote Version 2.0 for Apple. Lotus obviously went with IBM, and we know how that worked out.
From its earliest days, the spreadsheet was immediately seen as useful for things other than financial calculations. Who were some of your first nonfinancial customers?
As I recall, among the first hundred users were people in the medical field, who used it to calculate factors pertaining to anesthesiology and open-heart surgery. When you find out something like that, you gulp, and hope your insurance agent doesn't find out about it. It was also used to figure out the optimum organization of slot machines on the floor of a casino. My mother worked as a school principal in the '90s and used a spreadsheet to keep track of students and classes. One day she called me up and said, "Hey, did you know this thing can also do calculations?" There was a time when even businesspeople didn't always know that. Some people kept cheap calculators glued to their computers to add or subtract or whatever before entering the values into the cells!
Nintendo probably doesn't have to fight Excel for mind-share among 10-year-olds, but today people are exposed to spreadsheets quite early.
Yes, spreadsheets are now being taught, both in terms of the way of thinking they represent and how to actually use them, from a young age. They don't necessarily teach it in the guise of an electronic spreadsheet, but they say, "Here's a column and a row, we do this and try that, what formula would we use for this one?" and so on.
That would seem to argue for spreadsheets always being with us.
It's a way of working that seems very natural, although for certain uses, such as databases, other products have replaced it, and may continue to replace it. For some financial applications, users may accept more restrictions because of what the software that imposes them can do.
In our day, when we first started computerizing things, we tried different ways of theorizing, and new ideas and new tools came about; constantly some things kept on getting replaced. So we all assumed that whatever we did would be replaced by a new thing later on. That was the Y2K problem. None of us believed that our code wouldn't be replaced in a few years. The pace of change was such that who would have thought that their programs would be around in the year 2000, to the point where decisions about how to handle the calendar actually posed a problem? We would have considered it egotistical to regard our code as analogous to bridges and waterways, meant to last 50 years or more, but in many cases, it played out that way. Looking at the spreadsheet, we never thought it would last this long. After all, we were still inventing new tools.
Reader Comments» Post a comment