Brad Marks
BradM at blackforestltd.com
Sat Mar 2 09:24:47 CST 2013
All, Back in the 1980s and 1990s I attended a number of IBM DB2 User Conferences. At each conference they would have a few "non technical" presentations. I remember one such presentation where the speaker talked about the history of software. Here is what I recall regarding Visicalc. Two college roommates (might have been at MIT, I can't remember for sure) liked to go out drinking beer and chasing girls. One was an accounting major and the other CS (or whatever they called CS back then). During one semester, the guy with the accounting major had many assignments that required many spreadsheets (done with paper and pencil back then). This took a very long time and was very frustrating work. But even worse, he was not able to go out drinking and chasing girls very often. His roommate (the computer guy) said that he would write a "Visual Calculator" for his friend in order to free up some of his time. This "Visual Calculator" evolved into VisiCalc. Which gave birth to the whole realm of computer-based spreadsheets such as Excel. I am not sure if this is a true story or not, but it is surely worth repeating :-) Probably there are many innovative ideas that were tied to beer drinking and/or carnal desires in some fashion. Brad -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com on behalf of Gustav Brock Sent: Sat 3/2/2013 8:01 AM To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [AccessD] I was not going to post this Hi John Right, and before that it was Visicalc which was the first application that, to me on the PET computer, showed real business power other than text processing. /gustav