The Killer Application

The series on setting the record straight about computer history continues. Microsoft was not the first to invent a spreadsheet. In 1979 the Californian company Software Arts was working on a product called VisiCalc for the Apple II. A product that ushered in the industrial age of computing. With VisiCalc, for the first time, you could do spreadsheet calculations. Write formulas and have the results computed. For many companies VisiCalc was the sole reason to buy a computer at all. Daniel Bricklin had the idea for VisiCalc while still a student. He explained it to his friend Bob Frankston, who founded Software Arts with him. Frankston had an Apple II, on which the two began turning their ideas, drawn up as sketches, into assembler.
When the first version was done, VisiCalc was wonderful at calculating, but nobody knew that. Daniel proved it when he drew up a five-year profit and loss forecast for Pepsi overnight and presented it to his professor, who was impressed by how quickly Daniel could solve the problems. Dan Fylstra, head of Personal Software, took over distribution and advertised VisiCalc in “Byte”, the computer magazine of the day. It appeared in an ad an eighth of a page in size: “VisiCalc - How did you ever do without it?”. Good question, but what VisiCalc could actually do, the ad didn't say. Sales failed to materialise.
In May 1979 Personal Software invited a few select people to a demonstration of VisiCalc and other software at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It was there that Daniel Bricklin first met Dave Winer, who was presenting his outliner VisiText in the same room (more on that another time). Both had software that could revolutionise the IT world. But only one of them made it. Had Benjamin Rosen of Morgan Stanley not written an article back then about VisiCalc, describing it as the killer application par excellence, but about VisiText instead, today we would plan our projects in Microsoft Outliner as matter-of-factly as we build tables and charts in Excel.
Benjamin Rosen, one of the most important people in IT at the time, wrote:

So who knows? VisiCalc could some day become the software tail that waqs (and sells) the personal computer dog.

Daniel and Bob moved into a basement beneath another software company and finished their code. Daniel sent the first five floppy disks to very early customers. He still wrote the labels by hand. The first real retail version (1.37) came in a leather case holding all the disks plus the ten reference cards.
Sales figures shot up. The small company moved to an office complex in Cambridge. VisiCalc was ported to further systems, among them the Apple III, TRS-80 m2 and m1, Commodore PET CBM-80, HP 125, Atari 800 and the IBM PC. The latter gave the company another boost on top of the sales of Apple II versions. Personal Software renamed itself VisiCorp and in September 1983 sued Software Arts, who in turn countersued. The dispute ended in a settlement in 1984. VisiCorp was dissolved, without the VisiCalc software. Software Arts was sold to Lotus, where the know-how went into the successful 1-2-3 spreadsheet.

VisiCalc can be downloaded from Dan Bricklin's website as an MS-DOS version that still runs under Windows XP.