I was fascinated with it, and also the story of the way it was developed. It was really clunky. complicated and a PITA to use, but boy, how the “what if” stuff worked so fast.
Spreadsheets really have gotten a whole lot easier to use, but anybody who could figure out Visicalc had to be dogged.
Actually, I was quite happy when Lotus 1-2-3 came along, as it was far easier (relative term) to use. Actually, I still use v. 9.7 although, as I recall I started with v2. I think v1 was just for mainframes. Anybody remember that?
I remember hearing about VisiCalc but I had to go look up Commodore 64 software - Wikipedia to remember that my pre-Lotus spreadsheet experience came from MultiPlan. I never got into any of the 64’s software to rival Lotus, but I got to be a whiz with Lotus. I hated it when our company jumped to Excel.
My first job out of law school was at Arthur Andersen’s world headquarters in Chicago, where the managers had just been given PCs with VisiCalc and the pressure was on to show that they were making good use of them. So one of my bosses began typing up her weekly status reports in VisiCalc, which you may remember had fixed-length eight-character cells. Whenever she wanted anything revised, she would have me do it, because it required retyping every character after the alteration.
I had it on my Atari 800XL and I thought that it was easy to use to add up columns and such. I bought the computer for the word processor, but I saw the value of the spreadsheet program immediately.
Never did. I got involved in such stuff after Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the market. Loved the macro capability. As companies switched to MS Office, I really didn’t like Excel’s Visual Basic format.
I didn’t get my first computer until the IBM PC was available (i did buy one of IBM’s first ones, though). I definitely remember the good old days when the accountants would ask for Visicalc “and something to run it on”.
Then 1-2-3 was released and just took over the world.
Does anyone else remember VP-Planner (the 1-2-3 knockoff that Lotus successfully sued out of business with their “look and feel” lawsuit)? I happily used VP-Planner for years.
I tried it a few times, but didn’t do any significant work on it. Have you used Wordstar (pretty sure that’s what it was called)? How about a dedicated word processor like a Micom?
I used PFS First Choice software suite. included pfs write, pfs plan (the spreadsheet).
It was on my already pc when I started a new job. It wasn’t bad at all for DOS software. There was even a database with it.
Later we went to Lotus and then Excel.
Yes, I used it when I worked at Atari in the early 80’s. It’s weird to think that I was taught to use it, instead of just getting in there and figuring it out like I do with new apps these days.
I got a demo of it on a Apple ][. Never did anything with it though. I didn’t really need to use a spreadsheet until Multiplan came along. Did quite a bit of scientific analysis and charting with Multiplan/Chart until Excel came out.
I never used Visicalc. My first spreadsheet program was Quattro. I didn’t use Excel until I was out of grad school. These days I mostly use the Google Doc spreadsheet.
I was never a big fan of spreadsheets. Any number crunching I did while in school or for a job was with self-coded programs on data stored as raw files. Lately, I have been doing my taxes with spreadsheets; that’s works fairly well.
Quattro, that was part of the office suite when WordPerfect jumped on the suite bandwagon, wasn’t it?
After having already bought Lotus for spreadsheets, and WordPerfect for documents (and Alpha IV for database management), who needed to spend MORE money for some “integrated” suite?
Which is why it made NO sense for companies to spend even more money for an office suite that was “integrated” with the OS, and everyone had to learn ALL over again about the differences and idiosyncrasies of new software. But I have to admit, Powerpoint was innovative and other publishers tried to play catchup and failed.
WordStar, now THERE was an abortion. But it was there when nothing else was, and it worked, primitive though it was.
