TXnMA
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 ...
“I transitioned to Excel and Word....and still have v2007 on my laptop “
I have Office v2003 on all of my (Windows 7) PCs — Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc. DH put Office 365 on his Windows 10 laptops and it’s a hot mess.
I also have WordPerfect, but don’t use it as much, as it’s not any better than Word now. The DOS version was great. Once it went to Windows it lost a lot of it’s good features.
Supercalc was a good one too. Lotus for DOS was always my favorite. DbaseIII was the other killer ap. It had a very handy SQL programming language that made desktop PC computers sing.
The program used backslash commands, in part because the programmer had a lifelong injury to one of his fingers. :^) It was the software that built the market for hardware, period.
Back in the 1970s, I was doing taxes for my family and relatives. I wrote my own tax program for my Apple II in 1978, and continually modified it as needed. Should have marketed it, but missed the boat on that. I later bought a program, I think it was called Accu-Tax which pretty much did what my program did and stopped updating my program. Back then the Feds allowed lots of deductions that complicated programming; now taxes are simple enough to do manually.
As for spreadsheets, I pretty much used all of them including VisiCalc, and preferred products that worked on my CP/M processor on my Apple-II.
I agree, and loved dBaseIII. Besides using it early on with my Apple computers, in the late 1980s I programmed a system for a Wang mini-computer shop with dBase code that I compiled into machine code. It allowed their data entry staff to enter and track employee hours and pay for hundreds of employees. dBase made it a snap to write.
Of course, those functions need not be accounting functions, they could be the most complex of scientific and/or engineering functions!! And, changing the value of a single cell could be calculated into the output of any number of "dependent cells...
For those of us scientists/engineers who comprehended what Joe was saying, we followed his lead and moved into a totally new realm of computational power!
I must admit, VisiCalc forever expanded my concept of the accessible, practical power of computational mathematics -- right in the hands of the end user. (No stacks of punch cards needed...)
Agreed. I always wondered why Quattro didn't sue MS Excel for stealing all its goodies, separate tabs, etc.
Or teletype paper tape. We had little tools for punching holes in the medium by hand when the need arose. These were called ‘chicken pluckers.”
Lol. An old techie person. :)
Well, I still don't (but I do sit in front of one all day long, so it's not like I'm a Luddite or something...)
i still remember the awe i felt when i first saw Excel on a Macintosh ... i was totally blown away and instantly recognized the revolution GUI programs were going to spawn ...
I bought VisiCalc early on to use on our Apple 2. Then Lotus 1-2-3 was introduced and I thought “This is going nowhere. They won’t be able to knock off Visicalc.”
I switched to Lotus 1-2-3.
Then Microsoft Excel was introduced and I thought “This is going nowhere. They won’t be able to knock off Lotus 1-2-3.”
If you need investment advice, send me a FReepMail. ;>)
You haven’t used an antiquated pile of horse crap unless you’ve used IBM “PROFS,” their PRofessional OFfice System on a green and black terminal. There was about zero adoption at my company even though IT kept pushing it onto the company. We brought our own PCs into the company and used them with our own early Ethernet network built with our own cable and some early email system. Our CIO absolutely hated us, but our little experiment showed her we were right.
Yep. First spreadsheet software I learned. I loved it. Then, had to transition to Excel, which was even BETTER. Dang, some of the memories. I worked for Union Bay Sportswear in Kent, Washington,in the accounting department. Most of us had to learn it on the fly, along with some database programs. I got pretty good at it, and spent a lot of time helping the older gals set up their spreadsheets.
lucky you dint get fired for making them all look bad... Visicalc to Lotus to SAS, now i'm forced to use Excel
IOW: Work smart, not hard.
Right On!!! Go for it, We need some more Real Lawyers.
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