<application, tool, business, history> The first spreadsheet
program, conceived in 1978 by Dan Bricklin, while he was an
MBA student at Harvard Business School. Inspired by a
demonstration given by Douglas Engelbart of a
point-and-click user interface, Bricklin set out to design
an application that would combine the intuitiveness of
pencil and paper calculations with the power of a
programmable pocket calculator.
Bricklin's design was based on the (paper) financial
spreadsheet, a kind of document already used in business
planning. (Some of Bricklin's notes for VisiCalc were
scribbled on the back of a spreadsheet pad.) VisiCalc was
probably not the first application to use a spreadsheet model,
but it did have a number of original features, all of which
continue to be fundamental to spreadsheet software. These
include point-and-type editing, range replication, and
formulas that update automatically with changes to other
cells.
VisiCalc is widely credited with creating the sudden demand
for desktop computers that helped fuel the microcomputer
boom of the early 1980s. Thousands of business people with
little or no technical expertise found that they could use
VisiCalc to create sophisticated financial programs. This
makes VisiCalc one of the first killer apps.
