When the spreadsheet launched in 1979, it was a bewildering piece of software. People had no idea what they were looking at. A computer screen, filled with a grid of numbers?
As Keith Houston explains in his new history of the pocket calculator, Empire of the Sum, they hadn’t realised that the rows and columns of a spreadsheet could be functional rather than decorative. Accustomed to writing numbers by hand on an 11-by-17 inch sheet of gridded paper designed for accountancy, they would type the same numbers into the computer grid and then do what they had done for the past couple of decades: figure out the sums with a calculator.
This posed quite the problem to Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the digital spreadsheet, and his colleagues Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra. When Frankston presented their product, “VisiCalc”, at the National Computer Conference in 1979, the audience consisted almost entirely of friends and associates. Frankston counted only two strangers in the audience, both of whom left before the end.