Posted on 05/22/2019 8:21:56 AM PDT by Borges
In 1978, a Harvard Business School student named Dan Bricklin was sitting in a classroom, watching his accounting lecturer filling in rows and columns on the blackboard.
Every time the lecturer changed a figure, he had to work down and across the grid on the board, erasing and rewriting other numbers to make everything add up, just as accounting clerks all over the world did every day in the pages of their ledgers.
It's boring and repetitive work. A two-page spread across the open fold of the ledger is called a "spreadsheet".
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It's a cliche that the robots are coming for our jobs.
But the story is never as simple as that, as the digital spreadsheet proves.
If the concept of a robot accountant means anything, surely it means VisiCalc or Excel. These programs put hundreds of thousands of accounting clerks out of work.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
The purpose of computers was to put clerks out of work.
Thanks to the income tax, gov folks realized early that in order to do everybody’s taxes, the number of clerks required would grow to equal the number of people in the country. A computing machine was needed and the Eniac was born.
Lotus 1 2 3 and Quattro Pro were just about the coolest.
I practically live in Excel. I love it, and would not want to ever do without it.
Plus you get microwaved to death in the same deal! Enjoy!
I forget what it was called, but the spreadsheet I used with Lotus 1-2-3 became a massive semi-automated opus, but I couldn’t take it with me. So the next company I worked for, I redid the whole thing in Visual Basic for Applications. That was such a beauty, a visiting tech from Tokyo took a copy home and rewarded me later with a jar of nuts. LOL
When I started in Water & Wastewater Business the Lab work sheets, Chemical Dosages, Plant Meter Readings, Hourly and Daily Storage Tank Data Sheets had ALL been created in ExCell and they were just printing out pages with empty Cells too be filled in by hand and calculated with a handheld calculator and then written in the Cell on the Printed Page. Some of the Tests took 1 hour just to Calculate after doing multiple tests required to use results in the Calculation.
I asked why this was not a Realtime Spreadsheet and was told “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Well I worked the Graveyard Shift so while doing My Job I spent about a month creating the Formulas to crunch the numbers instantly when entering the Lab Test Results so the Answer was in the Cell on the Computer. Then at the end of the month the Reports that had to go to the State Water Commission would have already grabbed the Data from each of the other Spreadsheets and completed the Final Reports to be Printed out for Hardcopy to file away and then I would E-Mail the Final Report to the Commission. All in about 1 hour as opposed to several days and then Mailing it in just before the deadline.
I ended up making that happen at 4 different Water & Wastewater Plants over the 10 years I was in the Business.
Most of My Coworkers had at least 4 years of College and some even had what I call an EFd or an Elmer Fudd (PHd, Book smart but no Street smarts) or a B.S. plus years and/or decades in Water & Wastewater Treatment. While little old Me dropped out of High school when I got My Drivers license at 16. (I did finally see a use for all that fancy Math stuff, when I was 40.)
Now I make Spreadsheets for entertainment. Isn’t Life strange ?
I'm not a lawyer, and don't play one on Television.
As someone who was very active in the Washington State Supreme Court, in a case that dragged on for just over ten year's, (Trying to form a new county) WordPerfect & Lawyers seemed to be the weapon of choice.
I'm not sure if Microsoft "OFFICE" is making in roads to the Legal Professionals. Maybe someone who sign's their name and attaches their Bar Number when submitting paper work (Motions etc.,) to the courts, can speak to this.
So he wrote a program for the new Apple II personal computer: an electronic spreadsheet.
His friend Bob Frankston helped him sharpen up the software - and, on 17 October 1979, VisiCalc went on sale.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
WHAT? You mean the first killer app was not Freecell? You could have fooled a hell of a lot of office workers.
I had thought I had managed to avoid completely avoid Notes in my career, then got a consulting gig about 15-16 years ago where I had to use it for a year or two. Even back then, we groused about having to use that antiquated pile instead of Outlook/Exchange.
It had a bad propensity to crash, to the point where I found this random utility called KillNotes that would shut down all the background processes still running when it would crash. If you didn’t have KillNotes, you’d have to reboot your computer to start Notes up again. KillNotes lived on my desktop for easy access, which says something about the quality (or lack thereof) of Notes code. And it was a fairly mature product even then, over 10 years old.
I agree. I'll work like a dog on a formula so that I never have to think about it again. And some of my formulas are in excess of 400 characters.
“Back then Bill Gates asked “why would anybody need more than 640k?”
Similar to when an insurance agent who shared our office space got an IBM with a 20 meg hard drive. We calculated it would take decades to use all the space.
My first computer was an IBM PC Jr. It had a floppy disk and cartridge-based Lotus 1-2-3. I created a word-processing macro for it.
I would get my letter typed just how I wanted it, then save it to floppy disk, take it to the guy who had a dot-matrix printer, printed it, and handed it to the secretary, who would re-type it into the big Xerox word processor they used for all the official company correspondence.
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
Ken Olsen
I seen a Qutro-Pro Spread Sheet, (think Excel Spread Sheet) couldn't figure out how to use it.
I happened to notice that in WordPerfect on the tool bar you could insert "Cell's." I took a look to see if you could format the cell content to be only numerical, and if there was any example's. Need less to say, I was able to set up a "One-Page," "Two-Page" up to "Four Page" (never needed more than four pages) Estimates, for my Autobody Business. Just type in the cost of the part's, my self designed estimates would tally cost's both for labor separately, part's, taxes, and give a grand total.
I think what I'm trying to say is, I was "Code-ing" before I even knew that their was such a thing as "Code-ing."
I now only have my Welding Business, and do my receipts / estimate's in Wordperfect, Form(s) that I designed, and again as I type information in, the forms automatically update / add (Sales) Taxes to the total. Write a good formula once, just rinse and repeat.
Maybe now @ 65 yr's old I should go to Law school, I only have ten year's Appellate Experience.
In the mid-80’s, I was in grad school (MBA) and learning/using Lotus123 and WordPerfect.
Ahhhhh, those were the daze my friend, I thought they’d never end....
Later, I transitioned to Excel and Word....and still have v2007 on my laptop that functions just fine for my entrepreneurial endeavors.
WordPerfect tables were excellent spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best.
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