VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin: From killer app to iPhone app

Mac Daily News ^ | 12/7/2009

[Swordmaker]

Slick finger writin' note takin' iPhone app from Dan Bricklin of Visicalc fame PING!

Neat iPhone App Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[happinesswithoutpeace]

what up bro

[freedumb2003]

Everyone who USED Visicalc raise your hand.

Lotus123?

(LOL)

[happinesswithoutpeace]

??? I said what up

[happinesswithoutpeace]

Wow.

[the invisib1e hand]

his last big project was SocialCalc, a collaborative online spreadsheet

[the invisib1e hand]

Lotus123? (LOL)

On my 386.

[freedumb2003]

>>On my 386.<<

Winchester Hard Disk and 35 Mhz CPU — State Of The Art! And 5-1/4” floppies — none of them 8” floppies for us!

[the invisib1e hand]

wow, a 20 meg hard drive!

[Swordmaker]

Everyone who USED Visicalc raise your hand.

My hand is up... used it on an Apple II in 1979 through about 1981.

Lotus 1,2,3 wasn't released until 1983 and was developed out of Visicalc which Mitch Kapor bought from Bricklin in late 1981.

700,000 copies of Visicalc were sold... but it was slow and a bit buggy being the first. More efficient clones were better and took the market away from Visicorp. The most obviously successful was Excel written for Apple's Mac and then ported to Windows, it seized the market from everybody. Since nobody had invented the idea of patenting software ideas back then, Bricklin didn't patent the software spreadsheet so Supercalc, Multicalc, Lotus, Appleworks, et alia did not have to pay any royalties to Bricklin for his brilliant insight and the rest is history.

[justlurking]

Everyone who USED Visicalc raise your hand.

[raises hand]

Lotus123?

[raises hand again]

And I'd raise my hand for Quattro Pro and SuperCalc as well.

[happinesswithoutpeace]

Hey

[Swordmaker]

??? I said what up

Me, for one... it's late...

[justlurking]

On my 386.

Visicalc on an Apple II.
SuperCalc on a Z-80 with CP/M.
Lotus 123 on an 8088 (the original IBM PC).

[happinesswithoutpeace]

lol..

Do they even need a reason? Do they know something i don’t? But how could that be when they can’t even think?

Anon will fight.

[justlurking]

Winchester Hard Disk and 35 Mhz CPU — State Of The Art! And 5-1/4” floppies — none of them 8” floppies for us!

35 MHz? Try 4.77 MHz (the original 8088).

I have a 10 megabyte hard drive, one of the first 3-1/2 hard drives, back when everything else was 5-1/4 hard drives and 5 megabytes.

And yes, that is NOT past tense. I still have my original PC in storage. It still worked the last time I turned it on.

[justlurking]

For iPhone and iPod Touch users, here's the iTunes link for the application:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/note-taker-lite/id342311693?mt=8&uo=6

Note that this will start iTunes. If you don't already have iTunes installed, it's probably not going to work.

[freedumb2003]

>> 35 MHz? Try 4.77 MHz (the original 8088).

I have a 10 megabyte hard drive, one of the first 3-1/2 hard drives, back when everything else was 5-1/4 hard drives and 5 megabytes.

And yes, that is NOT past tense. I still have my original PC in storage. It still worked the last time I turned it on.<<

Oh man, now I gotta go back look stuff up. Are you sure that was/is an AT? The hard drive tells me it was, but I am thinking 4 Mhz is too slow. But that is my memory which has gone the opposite way — 1 Ghz back then and now I can squeeze double digits if I have to... :)

I have an old AT in my storage that I may fire up this weekend just for fun to see if it works...)

[freedumb2003]

>>And I’d raise my hand for Quattro Pro and SuperCalc as well.<<

DBase 2? :) Actually, ahead of its time...