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The Digital Century

We remember 100 computing events (crucial, improbable, or downright absurd) that changed our lives, opened our eyes, or made us smile.

  

Veni, Vidi, VisiCalc

The software industry's Holy Grail is the "killer app"--a program so essential that consumers buy computers just to use it. The archetypal killer app is VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet.

Toiling in an attic in Arlington, Massachusetts, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston devised the program in 1979. By adding up columns and rows of numbers on the fly, their software revolutionized number-crunching and completed in seconds tasks that would take an accountant hours to finish. More than 700,000 copies of the $99 program sold, making it the most popular software of its time.

But Bricklin and Frankston never patented VisiCalc, and by the mid-eighties Lotus's more sophisticated 1-2-3 had eclipsed it in sales. That program was in turn surpassed by Microsoft's Excel.

Bricklin and Frankston's design days weren't over. Bricklin went on to create the Trellix Web-publishing program, and Frankston pioneered home networking via phone lines.

--Harry McCracken

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