EXCEL is great but the real genius was VisiCalc ,, the basis for Excel and ALL the other spreadsheets.... IBM failed to patent/copyright it ,, “it was too obvious” to patent....
I had VisiCalc on 5.25”ers....
IBM had nothing to do with VisiCalc. From the Wikipedia:
VisiCalc traces its history to a presentation that Dan Bricklin was watching while attending Harvard Business School. The professor was creating a financial model on a blackboard that was ruled with lines to create a table, and formulas and data were being written into the cells. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table. Bricklin realized that he could replicate the process on a computer using an "electronic spreadsheet" to view results of underlying formulae.Bricklin was joined by Bob Frankston, and the pair worked on VisiCalc for two months during the winter of 1978–79, forming Software Arts. Bricklin wrote, "[W]ith the years of experience we had at the time we created VisiCalc, we were familiar with many row/column financial programs. In fact, Bob had worked since the 1960s at Interactive Data Corporation, a major timesharing utility that was used for some of them and I was exposed to some at Harvard Business School in one of the classes." Bricklin is referring to the variety of report generators that were in use at that time, including Business Planning Language (BPL) from International Timesharing Corporation (ITS) and Foresight, from Foresight Systems. However, these earlier timesharing programs were not completely interactive, nor did they run on personal computers.
Frankston described VisiCalc as a "magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations", which "allows the user to just solve the problem using familiar tools and concepts". Personal Software began selling it in mid-1979 for under $100, after a demonstration at the fourth West Coast Computer Faire and an official launch on June 4 at the National Computer Conference. It required an Apple II with 32K, and supported saving to cassette or disk.