Computing's first 'killer app' changed everything(bbc.co.uk)
bbc.co.uk
Computing's first 'killer app' changed everything
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47802280
43 comments
I've always been bad at doing hand calculations (probably my adhd); In my first course of calculus I asked my professor if he would still give me points on problems where the final answers didn't match because of calculations errors but the overall reasoning was sound.
He said "well... ok, standards have gone down over the years", then he looked in the amphitheater where he had a section of chairs that had missing desks and finally said: " though I really shouldn't, because you're all engineers, and just look what engineers that make "small" errors in calculations" accomplish".
Probably I could not have become an engineer 100 years ago.
He said "well... ok, standards have gone down over the years", then he looked in the amphitheater where he had a section of chairs that had missing desks and finally said: " though I really shouldn't, because you're all engineers, and just look what engineers that make "small" errors in calculations" accomplish".
Probably I could not have become an engineer 100 years ago.
We didn't quite invent everything. We didn't invent spreadsheets, and there's actually a good lesson in that. I think the reason we didn't invent spreadsheets is that we didn't have any use for them, since we didn't do accounting. - Dr. Butler Lampson, on Xerox PARC (2016)
... via http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
... via http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
I think the formulas being wrong helped solidify the value, as it showed that even if something that core is wrong, it will fix it immediately without any extra rework.
It would have had the same effect if only one formula was left intentionally wrong :)
It would have had the same effect if only one formula was left intentionally wrong :)
[deleted]
Bricklin didn't invent spreadsheets, they had existed for hundreds of years. He wasn't even the first to use a digital computer to implement one. He was, however, in the right place at the right time to put spreadsheets in the hands of many more people in a much more convenient and powerful form.
See: http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html
See: http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html
Bricklin invented the software spreadsheet. It's only a need to debase Bricklin's obvious credit, that leads to the claim that comparable spreadsheets existed prior to VisiCalc. They did not. That's precisely why it was such a marvel.
Whatever existed prior to VisiCalc, was not similar to the spreadsheet as we know it and define it today. It's a path that VisiCalc blazed, to universal credit by everyone that was in the industry at the time and helped pioneer software.
Whatever existed prior to VisiCalc, was not similar to the spreadsheet as we know it and define it today. It's a path that VisiCalc blazed, to universal credit by everyone that was in the industry at the time and helped pioneer software.
What, specifically, are you asserting that Bricklin invented?
It wasn't the visual paradigm of a tabular presentation. It wasn't the two-formed concept of cells having both values and formulas, or that the formulas could be stated in terms of other cell's values.
It wasn't that you could do what accountants had done for centuries using the same tools. It wasn't that the same type of calculations could be done using a computer.
So what we're left is that he took a visual concept and implemented it on a screen. I don't think that qualifies as "invention", myself. It is re-implementation, copying, or something that doesn't involve a conceptual leap.
He was in the right place at the right time to spot the technological opportunity, and we are all better for that.
It wasn't the visual paradigm of a tabular presentation. It wasn't the two-formed concept of cells having both values and formulas, or that the formulas could be stated in terms of other cell's values.
It wasn't that you could do what accountants had done for centuries using the same tools. It wasn't that the same type of calculations could be done using a computer.
So what we're left is that he took a visual concept and implemented it on a screen. I don't think that qualifies as "invention", myself. It is re-implementation, copying, or something that doesn't involve a conceptual leap.
He was in the right place at the right time to spot the technological opportunity, and we are all better for that.
LANPAR was invented in 1969, well before VisiCalc:
http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html
In many fields, spreadsheet apps still are the killer app(s). I worked at a company that made tax software, and to this day Excel is still a mandatory skill for an accountant, despite the "advanced" software we have these days. In project management in many industries as well the data is largely spreadsheet driven.
Couple that with the fact that you can literally use a Google Sheet as the database backend for small apps, and I think it's a good case that spreadsheets are still killer.
Couple that with the fact that you can literally use a Google Sheet as the database backend for small apps, and I think it's a good case that spreadsheets are still killer.
Back in the day, Google itself used spreadsheets as the backend of small pages (e.g. customer success stories). The reason I know that is because I found a few spreadsheets that were writable by anyone, and ultimately led to cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities in google.com. I reported a bunch of those to their vulnerability rewards program.
It's popular to make fun of Excel in some circles, but it really is a nearly perfect tool for innumerable real-world business tasks. It's intuitive enough that newcomers can do some work with minimal instruction, and powerful enough that you can manage a half-billion dollar book of business with it.
More than any of the iterations of Windows, Excel is Microsoft's great contribution to software, and I say that as an old-school MS hater.
I think people too often forget that "useful" is the key ingredient in killer software.
More than any of the iterations of Windows, Excel is Microsoft's great contribution to software, and I say that as an old-school MS hater.
I think people too often forget that "useful" is the key ingredient in killer software.
Another view is that spreadsheet software is the first user-friendly way to create computer programs almost anyone can do: you have input, algorithms you define, and output.
Excel was considerably inferior to Supercalc for many years, only winning because it was almost impossible to buy a pc without windows and office preinstalled for a chunk of the 90s
I saw a guest lecture in my HCI class at CMU this semester from Dan Bricklin [1], who demoed VisiCalc for us on an emulator [2]. One thing that really struck me was how similar the interface was to today's Excel or Google Sheets. He even demonstrated how a lot of the original shortcuts still worked in Excel.
Another fun bit of his talk, about the max digits in VisiCalc:
The number of digits that we stored for precision, it was stored as binary-coded decimal, just like a calculator, it was not stored as a binary number. It was stored as the digits, so that it would be exactly the same that you would see on your calculator, without funny round-off errors and stuff like that.
But we had to figure out what the maximum number of digits would be. And we decided, let’s - ha-ha. We thought, here us, two little programmers trying to figure out if anyone would use it. Let’s take the budget of the United States of America, in dollars. That’s the maximum, at the time. So that’s the maximum number of digits we had. Sure enough, within a few years, people were using it, according to the Wall Street Journal, for calculating the budget of the United States of America, but only in dollars, not in pennies, because that’s all it could do without going to scientific notation.
[1] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
[2] https://www.pcjs.org/apps/pcx86/1981/visicalc/
[3] http://www.notetakerhd.com/about.html
Another fun bit of his talk, about the max digits in VisiCalc:
The number of digits that we stored for precision, it was stored as binary-coded decimal, just like a calculator, it was not stored as a binary number. It was stored as the digits, so that it would be exactly the same that you would see on your calculator, without funny round-off errors and stuff like that.
But we had to figure out what the maximum number of digits would be. And we decided, let’s - ha-ha. We thought, here us, two little programmers trying to figure out if anyone would use it. Let’s take the budget of the United States of America, in dollars. That’s the maximum, at the time. So that’s the maximum number of digits we had. Sure enough, within a few years, people were using it, according to the Wall Street Journal, for calculating the budget of the United States of America, but only in dollars, not in pennies, because that’s all it could do without going to scientific notation.
[1] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
[2] https://www.pcjs.org/apps/pcx86/1981/visicalc/
[3] http://www.notetakerhd.com/about.html
> One thing that really struck me was how similar the interface was to today's Excel or Google Sheets.
UIs typically recapitulate neoteny: from the beginning, competitive spreadsheets needed to be UI-compatible with Visicalc (even today Excel accepts most Visicalc controls, and has, I have been told by Frankston+, VisiCalc-compatible bugs). Notably, spreadsheets or spreadsheet-like interfaces that don't confirm people's assumptions struggle in the market (e.g. Apple Numbers).
+ Bob Frankston who was the implementor of Visicalc, and later worked at Microsoft, though not on Excel. You can thank him that Windows had TCP rather than some proprietary system...for the same path-dependency / network reasons.
UIs typically recapitulate neoteny: from the beginning, competitive spreadsheets needed to be UI-compatible with Visicalc (even today Excel accepts most Visicalc controls, and has, I have been told by Frankston+, VisiCalc-compatible bugs). Notably, spreadsheets or spreadsheet-like interfaces that don't confirm people's assumptions struggle in the market (e.g. Apple Numbers).
+ Bob Frankston who was the implementor of Visicalc, and later worked at Microsoft, though not on Excel. You can thank him that Windows had TCP rather than some proprietary system...for the same path-dependency / network reasons.
The article briefly mentions:
>the Jennifer Unit, an earpiece that directs warehouse pickers to collect products by breaking down instructions into the most mindless, idiot-proof steps.
That makes me think of the story of Manna, which predicted something like this. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
>the Jennifer Unit, an earpiece that directs warehouse pickers to collect products by breaking down instructions into the most mindless, idiot-proof steps.
That makes me think of the story of Manna, which predicted something like this. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
That's exactly what I thought of. I thought, dear god, it's real. I really hope someone didn't read Manna and think, gee, that sounds like a good idea!
I have to disagree with Marshall Brain's "solution" to the problem. When I read those final chapters, I couldn't help but think the Vertebrane system was subtly and insidiously even worse than Manna.
I have to disagree with Marshall Brain's "solution" to the problem. When I read those final chapters, I couldn't help but think the Vertebrane system was subtly and insidiously even worse than Manna.
I just read it, it's a great story. I can see some obvious drawbacks to Vertebrane (I like my privacy), but I can't imagine it being worse than Manna.
Privacy was my first concern about it, too. Okay, so maybe not worse than Manna, but at least as bad as, if in a different way.
Also note the inventors of VisiCalc failed to patent it for various reasons[1]. This led to quick improvements of the spreadsheet by Lotus, Borland and Microsoft. If it had been patented, it is unlikely innovation would have been so fast with VisiCalc having a monopoly.
[1] http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm
[1] http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm
The lessons from this article are many, the 400,000 jobs lost book-keeping vs. 600,000 jobs gained accounting is a figure worth remembering if you are trying to get some automation introduced somewhere.
There are parallels in many areas of customer service for instance. Anywhere where you can do a better job of helping the customer with knowledgeable staff that don't have to be doing so much mundane stuff.
There are parallels in many areas of customer service for instance. Anywhere where you can do a better job of helping the customer with knowledgeable staff that don't have to be doing so much mundane stuff.
True, but the figures can be misleading. The US economy is probably 4x the size it was in 1978, so without these productivity advances we'd need 4x as many book-keepers and accountants.
Whether the economy could have grown to 4x the size without productivity advances like spreadsheets is a related question.
Whether the economy could have grown to 4x the size without productivity advances like spreadsheets is a related question.
Almost 9x by GDP
The title's use of quotes made me think it was going to be an article on the Therac-25 incident, whose software was arguably the true first "killer" app and is used as a cautionary tale in every intro level human computer interaction course
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Accountants are surprisingly avante garde technologists.
Sumerian accountants seem to have invented cuineform, which evolved into the (AFAIK) earliest widespread writing system. Italian accountants (including Fibonacci's dad) first adopted Indo–Arabic numerals, because they made ledgering easier than roman numerals.. and opened the door to arab mathematics systems like algebra
Sumerian accountants seem to have invented cuineform, which evolved into the (AFAIK) earliest widespread writing system. Italian accountants (including Fibonacci's dad) first adopted Indo–Arabic numerals, because they made ledgering easier than roman numerals.. and opened the door to arab mathematics systems like algebra
Electronic spreadsheets seem like such an obvious advantage of early personal computers that it's a bit surprising they weren't expressly designed with that in mind. I think their rise should serve as a reminder that building flexible systems gives people the ability to use your systems in amazing ways you never envisioned.
Whenever someone claims that robots will destroy our jobs, I point them to spreadsheets. How many people in the world were using physical spreadsheets before the advent of their software cousins? Ten thousand? How many people use Excel today? Hundreds of millions? Spreadsheet software has increased the number of spreadsheet workers by many orders of magnitude. It's a very extreme example, and not all automation will be the same story, but it's not all doom and gloom
The lump of labor fallacy get pushed by journalists because it's actually operative in their field. Technological advances were not accompanied by demand for higher quality. If anything the lump has arguably gotten smaller.
[deleted]
I would like a (pseudo-)mode that color code the cells depending on the format they are in. And tools to easily change said format (let’s call it type). And probably use text by default.
Bank ATMs were the first computing killer app, allowing people access to cash outside normal banking hours.
I don't think ATMs appeared equally early everywhere, but in any case, 'killer app' in this context points to the fact that the Visical application made businesses go out and buy Apple II computers, just so they could run Visicalc. They didn't, before Visicalc. That little piece of software made the sales of Apple II explode and laid the fundament for having something like the IBM PC in the office. ATMs were very useful for people, but it didn't create a fundamental change in the use of computers.
Supercalc got me starting my career as a software developer.
First killer app was calculating trajectories for artillery.
This is both true, and humorous. A lot of advances in mechanical computing were driven by the needs of WWI and WWII artillery battalion colonels, and ship captains - hitting distant, often-times moving targets at different elevations, and in various wind conditions.
For example, the Mark I mechanical computer[1] could, when pointed at a target, measure its distance, altitude and heading, its own ship's speed, pitch, and heading, current windspeed - and combine that with the chosen projectile type, weight, propellant type, and current temperature - all to compute a firing solution that had the best chance of sinking ships adorned with swastikas, or a rising sun.
Not a general-purpose computation machine, but work on these sorts of devices heavily overlapped with work on programmable computers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer
For example, the Mark I mechanical computer[1] could, when pointed at a target, measure its distance, altitude and heading, its own ship's speed, pitch, and heading, current windspeed - and combine that with the chosen projectile type, weight, propellant type, and current temperature - all to compute a firing solution that had the best chance of sinking ships adorned with swastikas, or a rising sun.
Not a general-purpose computation machine, but work on these sorts of devices heavily overlapped with work on programmable computers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer
Quite literally a killer app, at that. As were many of the other earliest uses of computers -- wartime cryptanalysis and numerical computations for nuclear weapon development.
Killer perhaps, but I'd rather numerical than experimental development of nuclear weapons
[deleted]
If you've never spreadsheeted on paper you may not realize the glory of even the most primitive spreadsheet app. I used to use erasers until my fingers went numb or white-out by the quart.
Up hill both ways. You young whippersnappers have no idea how good you have it.
I sat with the prof to show him my first attempt, with a half dozen formulas in it. He looked over my shoulder and showed me that every. fucking. formula. was wrong. I felt humiliated. But we fixed them as we went, and watching the changes flow into the cells was magic. My force had been multiplied.
The skills from VisiCalc have transferred to other spreadsheets over the years very well. It's amazing how much Mr. Bricklin got right. I wonder how much was his brilliance and how much was the inevitability of the design.