The Spreadsheet at 25: 25 Amazing Excel Examples that Evolved from the Invention that Changed the World

By Independent Publishers Group

From the 1979 invention by two MIT students of the visible calculator to the war between Lotus and Microsoft for dominance in the spreadsheet market, this book is a fascinating look at the software application that helped spur the entire computer industry. This loving look back at the early computer and technology evolution will teach anyone interested in computer history about the MIT students, Bricklin and Frankston, and their unique vision; how Mitch Kapor and Lotus 1-2-3 trumped VisiCalc; how the spreadsheet gave businesses a reason to buy PCs; and how Microsoft came to dominate the market. The book also contains descriptions of 25 amazing spreadsheets that users can download from the book's web site.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781615473243

Book preview

NOW?

CHAPTER - 1

THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD!

August De Morgan

19th Century

Using rows and columns for accounting can be traced back to August DeMorgan, a London mathematician in an 1846 book entitled Main Principle of Bookkeeping.

Richard Mattessich

1964

A Berkley professor, Richard Mattessich, realized that performing budgetary what-if analyses by hand was not productive. It could take a week to recalculate an entire budget, by which time the original assumptions would be obsolete.

In two books published in 1964, Mattessich proposed electronic spreadsheets for solving such problems. His Simulation of the Firm through a Budget Computer Program detailed a program that would allow rapid recalculation of a company budget. His book included the Fortran programming code to allow any firm with a mainframe computer to eliminate the mechanical pencils for the specific application of budgeting. Rather than being a general-purpose program like VisiCalc, Mattessich’s approach required a knowledge of the Fortran language.

Mattessich was clearly on the right track in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the computer hardware of the time was expensive and not readily available to the masses. Companies typically used teletype terminals to dial into a time-sharing mainframe, where charges were accrued by the minute. It was the right idea, but it would take fifteen years before sufficient computing power was available at a low enough price for most companies.

1976

In the 1970’s, personal computers were in their infancy. Byte magazine claimed to have 73,000 subscribers in 1976; people running computers like the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. Peter Jennings wrote MicroChess and sold the first copy in December 1976. It was one of the first computer games and eventually sold millions of copies. However, unless you were a hard-core chess fan, you probably were not going to pay $1000 to $2000 for a computer for the sole purpose of playing MicroChess.

For the average accountant, in 1978 a spreadsheet was still a large piece of green ledger paper with number figures written in with a mechanical pencil. Any accountant at the time kept a large eraser nearby because when you discovered that one number was wrong, all of the subsequent rows had to be recalculated.

1978

Dan Bricklin today

In 1978, at MIT, a graduate student named Dan Bricklin had a vision. What if you combined a fighter-pilot heads-up display and put a trackball on the bottom of a calculator? You would be able to roll the calculator backward to any previous entry, change the number, and all future calculations would change. It was a practical invention; Bricklin was constantly doing case study analyses using only a calculator.

Bricklin teamed up with Bob Frankston. Working in a Cambridge attic during 1978 and 1979, Frankston brought Bricklin’s invention to life.

Bob Frankston today

The heads-up display was replaced with an Apple ][ monitor. The trackball on the calculator was replaced by the two arrow keys on the Apple ][ keyboard.

It was quite a challenge for Frankston to fit the software into the 24K available on the Apple ][.

Two Arrow Keys?? The first Apple computers only had left and right arrow keys. To change these arrows to move up or down, you had to press the spacebar to toggle the arrow keys to move vertically or horizontally.

Bob Frankston & Dan Bricklin

Also in 1978, Peter Jennings of Microchess fame met Dan Fylstra of Personal Software. Fylstra was a programmer, Harvard MBA student, and a writer for Byte Magazine. They joined forces, and Microchess became the signature product for the young company. Fylstra had heard of Bricklin’s software