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 ...
One of the best advice comments that I have ever received:
Learn how to be lazy
What was meant was to learn it once, and get a computer to do the repetitive work.
Maybe we can put them back to work separating out carbon molecules from the air.
I felt like King of the World writing stat programs with CalcStar.
I preferred Multiplan back in the day. The spreadsheet certainly was a game-changer. And a spreadsheet error eas simply automating a clerical error. The difference was that what is printed on greenbar was gospel.
And the cautionary tale is that education is soooo important. Remember Øbama’s smart meter push? Meter-reader jobs vanished off the face of the economy. If you were unskilled, you were screwed. This is the future.
Just my opinion, but the spreadsheet is one of best software programs of all time. I use it many times every day.
I was an accounting clerk for an engineering firm on First Street in Cambridge, Mass - literally down the street from Lotus headquarters - in 1982 or so.
We’d just gotten an IBM AT or XT, I don’t remember, and I took the BASIC books home and learned a little of that programming, and was writing a program to do our very tedious billing cycle.
A salesman from Lotus came in one day, and showed me the new program, and I set up a spreadsheet - engineers across the top, (about 25 or 30) and services along the side (about 30 or 40) and ran the spreadsheet.
“Out of Memory.”
The fellow looked crushed, and I handed the disk back to him.
“There’s a company going nowhere,” I thought to myself as he left.
AppleWorks spreadsheet for the Apple IIc was my intro to the computerized spreadsheet world. Never looked back (to the paper/pencil version).
Back then Bill Gates asked "why would anybody need more than 640k?"
I loved Lotus, but had to transition to Excel.
From my DP101 instructor, circa 1978: “If you have to do it more than once, write a program.”
Been living that one ever since. :)
Lotus 123 was all the rage in my 1980’s office days. I never learned it.
But by the time Excel came along, I became proficient with that and have been using it ever since.
Where's VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 today?
Where's WordPerfect and WordStar today?
No 123 but we still have Lotus Notes.
Why can’t it die?
So what does ?
No WordStar anymore, but Word Perfect lives on...
Same question could be asked about Harvard Graphics.
Where is Harvard Graphics today?
I think I have a PowerPoint presentation on the "Rise and Fall of Harvard Graphics" somewhere around here...
I liked WordPerfect a lot.
“Just my opinion, but the spreadsheet is one of best software programs of all time. “
I agree. Word is another great program.
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