Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston released a small program in 1979 for the Apple ][ computer that changed history. VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program, and turned the personal computer into a serious business tool.
This month (October) marks the 30th anniversary of VisiCalc. While the DOS version of VisiCalc wasn't released until 2 years later, I thought it important to take a moment to celebrate this important milestone in PC history.
For those of you that are not familiar with VisiCalc, you are probably working with Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet applications. Under FreeDOS, you may have used AsEasyAs—which is still available. These spreadsheets still market themselves around some of the basic features first introduced in VisiCalc.
For those of you that are familiar with VisiCalc, take a moment to think back to what it allowed us to do. You can romanticize the memories—remember the good, gloss over the frustration. Please post your thoughts in the comments, below.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
About Me
- Jim Hall
- I'm Jim Hall, the founder and Project Coordinator for the FreeDOS Project. I started FreeDOS in 1994, when I was an undergraduate physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Other developers got in touch with me, and we began work creating our own version of DOS that would be compatible with MS-DOS. I shared the extended DOS utilities that I had written for myself, as did others. We also found public domain or open source programs that replaced other DOS commands. A few months later, we released our first FreeDOS “Alpha” distribution. And from there, FreeDOS grew into what you see today!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.