Background of the Study
Introduction
Daniel Singer Bricklin was born on the 16th of July in 1951 to a Jewish family living in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. He started programming while still in grade school at Akiba Hebrew Academy. To get a sense of who he was as a child, he wrote some extensions of FORTRAN for a science fair project. After high school, Bricklin attended MIT for mathematics, but quickly changed his major to computer science. He earned his degree in 1973. He then chose to attend Harvard Business School in pursuit of his MBA. He had seen something akin to the Mother of all Demos by Doug Engelbart, and then sitting in room 108 of Aldrich Hall, he daydreamed:
Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse… imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer ‘10% will be fine!’
The first prototype was in BASIC on Harvard Business School’s timesharing system in Spring of 1978. This prototype is where he figured out the rows, the columns, human-friendly naming for columns, and the status line. Riding his bike around Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1978, he decided he would build the product. The first home micro prototype did away with the thought of a mouse. He was working with an Apple ][ borrowed from Dan Fylstra of Personal Software, and he chose to use the arrow keys. Switching between horizontal and vertical movement was done with the space bar. This prototype was written in a weekend using Apple’s BASIC. It was rough, but it did have the columns, the rows, and the arithmetic. At this point, Bricklin’s friend, Bob Frankston, joined him in this endeavor and they took the program from prototype to polished product in two months over the winter of 1978/79.
Significance of the Study
1.1 This final product was written in 6502 assembly for the Apple II . Interestingly, for this step, the programming was done using a macro assembler for the 6502 that ran on MULTICS at MIT, which was accessed via a modem and a DEC Writer III LA-120. Due to the cost of time on the computer at MIT, development was done at night. Eventually, Bricklin and Frankston would have more hardware to write and test, and this development setup would no longer be needed.
VisiCalc was rapidly ported to both newer and older computers. Throughout 1980, VisiCalc was released for the the TRS-80 Model III, the Apple III, the IBM PC, the TRS-80 Model 2, the Commodore PET, the HP 125, and the Atari 800. 1981 saw a port to the Sony SMC-70.
1.2
Overview: The “Electronic Worksheet” The VisiCalc program was born out of the observation that many problems are commonly solved with a calculator, a pencil, and a sheet of paper three nearly universal tools. Calculating sales projections, income taxes, financial ratios, your personal budget, engineering changes, cost estimates, and balancing your checkbook are done with these tools. The VisiCalc program combines the convenience and familiarity of a pocket calculator with the powerful memory and electronic screen capabilities of the personal computer. With the VisiCalc program, the computer’s screen becomes a “window” that looks upon a much larger “electronic worksheet.” You can move or “scroll” this window in four directions to look at any part of the worksheet, or you can split the computer screen into two “windows” to see any two parts of the worksheet at the same time.
The worksheet is organized as a grid of columns and rows. The intersecting lines of the columns and rows define thousands of entry positions. At each position you can enter an alphabetic title, a number, or a formula to be calculated. Just by “writing” on the worksheet, One can set up your own charts, tables, and records. The formatting commands let one individualize the appearance of each entry, row, or column.
One could make your VisiCalc checkbook record look just like your bank statement.
But the power of the VisiCalc program lies in the fact that the computer remembers the formulas and calculations you use in solving a problem. If one changed a number you had previously written on the electronic worksheet, all other related numbers on the worksheet change before your eyes as the VisiCalc program automatically recalculates all of the relevant formulas. Recalculation makes the VisiCalc program a powerful planning and forecasting tool. You can correct mistakes and omissions, and examine various alternatives – effortlessly.
1.3
VisiCalc was the first program to employ an interface of columns and rows to create spreadsheets like those used in analog accounting books. VisiCalc’s Data Interchange Format (DIF) allowed users to enter and manipulate data without coding knowledge, making it easier to use computers for calculations and broadening the appeal of personal computers. Created by Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston and released in 1979, VisiCalc would be pivotal in establishing the personal computer as a viable tool for business and accounting purposes.
VisiCalc provides a method for storing data from a spreadsheet onto a special kind of disk file, called a DIF file. DIF stands for Data Interchange Format. The reason DIF is so special is that it stores data in such a way that it can be read by the VisiCalc program or by a BASIC program that you write yourself (or, for that matter, by any number of other programs that you may use on your computer.) In short, DIF files provide a THE VISICALC PROGRAM AND YOUR COMPUTER means of trading data between various programming tools
The three kinds of data entry into the VisiCalc program result in two types of data. Values are numerical data; labels are non numerical. Value references, which are the building blocks of formulas, result in numerical values.
1.4
ENTERING DATA There are three different kinds of data entry into the VisiCalc program, but they result in only two different types of data. Labels essentially represent nonnumeric data. Values and value references represent numeric data. In addition, value references can be used to build formulas for your worksheet. Put simply, a value reference is a way of duplicating the contents of any position on your spreadsheet for use in another position.
All of the functions have one thing in common. You had to enter a special “flag” character to alert the VisiCalc program of your intention to use a function. This flag is the “at” symbol on your keyboard (@). You must type this symbol as the first character of any of the functions; for example:
@SUM
@AVERAGE
@SIN
@MAX
VisiCalc had many functions that Microsoft Excell displays in its Formula Software.
VisiCalc became the first program on a personal computer to be responsible for driving sales of an entire system. By chance, the program’s developers used a borrowed Apple II to develop the program, and as a result that was the first system for which the program was released. When VisiCalc became available, sales of the previously struggling Apple II spiked, which was a boom for the company and made VisiCalc the first “killer app.”
Conclusion
By 1981 Software Arts, the company started by Bricklin and Frankston, had made over $12 million in royalties from VisiCalc. By 1983, however, more powerful programs such as the Lotus 1-2-3 had been released and outsold the outdated VisiCalc, which never regained its early industry position.
The personal computer revolutionized office spaces in the 1980s, and VisiCalc was the first application to firmly establish the need for the PC in the business environment. The importance of a spreadsheet application for businesses today is without question, and VisiCalc pioneered the spreadsheet technology that can still be seen in programs such as Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, and Google Sheets.
