How computing's first 'killer app' changed everything

BBC ^ | 5/22/2019 | Tim Harford

[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.

[SamAdams76]

I took accounting classes in school during the late 1970s and worked with graph paper, graduating to ledgers sheets like you see here. I really liked the old way of keeping the books. You had to concentrate on what you were doing because making mistakes was painful - sometimes taking hours to correct. Had to learn to write small and neatly as well.

But it still gives me a thrill looking at those old ledger sheets. I used to go into stationary stores and my heart would beat fast as I saw all the various sheets on display. To me, they were items of beauty.I wanted to buy all of them along with boxes of pencils and erasers!

The first electronic spreadsheet I used was Multiplan and it came with a heavy set of manuals that weighed about 15 pounds and fit into a large cardboard sleeve. Moved up to Quattro Pro and finally to Excel where I still am today.

I'm pretty good with Excel but I think I only use about 10-15% of the available tools and features. There's so much of Excel I still don't know.

[Chode]

good choice

[SunkenCiv]

The computer user group in Grand Rapids used to have a deep archive which included DOS 3.3 stuff such as WozCalc, a knockoff of Visicalc (Visicalc was copy protected, as were office software suites of that time, such as Incredible Jack).