DBase? What an atrocious program. I worked with two guys who love it. They swear by it. I hope they get the help they need.
Here and here are two sides of a Babylonian cuneiform tablet showing tabular data, IIRC, is has been interpreted as some kind of inventory/accounting data. Spreadsheets are indeed not a very new thing.
Tell me about it. I have been put in charge of continuing the development of a whole suite of stock and sales programs; the underlying database is a large collection of dBase tables which are not even slightly normalized. The trouble is that there are customers actually using the system. My predicament includes such considerations as:
-Not having the time and resources to implement the ideal solution (which would be rewriting the whole thing from scratch, with a decent database and just an import function to bring in a sensible interpretation of the existing data).
-Not being able to implement any sweeping changes to the code, in case something breaks.
Basically, the system is an accumulation of poor database design and poor programming choices, but I am more or less compelled to perpetuate and/or repeat them.
I did the ore reserve calculations for a gold mine group in a spreadsheet, with the help of VB macros, then output to the 3D graph tool for display. We’re talking about a doc. that determines the fate of billions of $ and thousands of employees, and I did it in Excel.
I’m not sure that this is correct. The earliest citation that I can find to the word “spreadsheet” in 1982. I believe that while the concept was much older, the pencil-and-paper predecessor was called, as noted above, a balance sheet. (That’s what we called them in retail management in '79.)
I barely qualify to answer this question, since I was like 10 when the big shift from Visicalc to Lotus 123 happened. My dad used Visicalc on our Atari 800 computer, and I played with it a bit because it did math better than BASIC, but my dad wrote his own spreadsheet-y software (checkbook balancer, etc.) at work after we switched to another computer. (I remember one year our household finances were contained on a stack of punchcards.) I was introduced to Lotus 123 in high school, and worked with it a lot in my after-school job. Anyway, here’s my take.
Lotus had better marketing, to be sure. I believe it also had more built-in functions and better macro capabilities, could use more memory (meaning larger spreadsheets), and played better with third-party tools such as Hahvahd Graphics.
Visicalc was tiny by comparison. It was designed to run efficiently on smaller 8-bit computers.
The cool thing about Visicalc is that it was written for like a bajillion platforms, including the IBM PC. However, it’s generally accepted that the platform that really sold it to businesses was its performance on the Apple IIe, which had wider exposure (and more clout with the techies) at the time.
BTW, Visicalc’s inventor Dan Bricklin has an excellent website about early spreadsheets and Visicalc in general.
Well, this is a hijack, and I agree that at first Word was inferior to WordPerfect, but… Excel was much better than 123. By the time Excel was introduced, 123 had become a bloated beast with an increasingly confusing interface. Excel, by comparison, was fast, clean and easy to use, and largely compatible with 123 documents.
Bah. When I was a kid, we used setup strings for modems too. 'Course, back then we call them initialization macros. String were what we used to connect the tin cans together. Kids these days, use strings in their programs, so of course they’ll look like spaghetti code, what do you expect? And these kids these days use too much tin foil in their hats, meaning less tin is available for the tin can phones, so we’ve had to use pipes to build the internet instead. Believe you me, it’s a lot easier to unknot a string than unclog a pipe, which is why modern web servers get bogged down so much.
This seems to be the kind of crowd to ask a question I’ve stumped the board with before: Why would green eyeshades be helpful?
Perhaps a new thread is warranted to cover the mechanical pencils now in general use and the crappy synthetic stuff that passes as erasers for said pencils.
I have a mechanical pencil from WWII days which uses a size of lead no longer available, except at highway robbery prices.
It has a red rubber eraser which still erases pencil marks.
The current white stuff appears to dry out, becomes hard, and smears the pencil marks instead of removing them!
WAG: Accountants/actuaries/computers for large companies worked in huge rooms with hundreds of desks. High above were very bright lights to illuminate all the pages full of tiny numbers down below. The eyeshades shaded the workers’ eyes from the glare above.
I had no idea spreadsheets were so interesting!
Seriously.
I also remember the pads of paper for accounting/bookkeeping/balance sheets. I used to get my dad to give me some, as I was (and is) an avid hoarder of office supplies. I used to use it for making neat lists of things.
One company I worked at had a couple of people still using a ledger book to record Receipts. Of course that was because the one guy was incompetent and his assistant a slavish drone who just copied his methodology but that’s another story. Anyhoo, as soon as they left it went on Excel thanks to me.
But yes, green columnar pads or individual sheets were used, and then inserted into heavy book-weight folders for posterity. The whole set of books for a company were calculated that way, with cross-referencing to detail sheets, etc. The checkbook sheets that preceded automated checkwriting were one subledger, deposits another, etc.
I wanted to say that I worked at the company mentioned above in the mid-90s, much later than any manual ledger should have been kept.
I included a link so I wouldn’t have to answer such basic questions!
Others have included followon links concerning VisiCalc. But for those resistant to looking at them: All other welll known spreadsheet programs came later. VisiCalc was developed for all the major (and many minor) personal computers types of the era. VisiCalc was the first killer app for personal computers.
Being first, second, etc. with a killer app, OS, and such doesn’t mean you can survive in this business long. So a properly updated version of VisiCalc was delayed too long, Lotus 1-2-3 temporarily took the lead, they screwed up, more saga-saga-saga.
So, nothing about the eyeshades that’s more than a guess?
I think you missed my point. I never used VisiCalc so I can’t compare it to Lotus 123. I did use Lotus 123 and, for business reasons, was forced to switch to Excel so I was able to make a comparison.
My understanding is that although VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet software, Lotus 123 was a better, more useful product and therefore deserved its status and success in the marketplace. Maybe it wasn’t first but it was better. On the other hand, Excel was just a bad immitation of Lotus 123. It’s only salvation was that it integrated better with Windows because Microsoft made sure of that. The graphing capability and the intuitiveness of 123 was far superior to Excel. I would use Excel for documents that had to be shared but when I was working on projects that were unique to me I always used 123 simply because it was better.
Yeah, but they are good guesses. Similar answers can be found at the Deadprogrammer’s Cafe and at Google Answers.
Lotus 1-2-3 was a bundle. the ‘1-2-3’ part was ‘Spreadsheet, Database, and charting’. Its big innovation was its ability to build graphs and charts from spreadsheet data, and its integration with the database. That was a big deal back then. Visicalc predated 123 by three or four years, and was already an established ‘killer app’ when Lotus appeared on the scene. Visicalc was much simpler, being restricted to merely doing calculations of rows and columns, but at the time that was revolutionary - so much so that an awful lot of people simply had trouble comprehending what you’d even use such a thing for. I remember quite well trying to explain Visicalc to people, and they just didn’t grasp the power of it. The attitude was like, “Okay, so you can put in a column of numbers and add it up. Whoop-de-do. My mechanical adding machine does that.”
Now my daughter is learning how to use a spreadsheet in grade 4.
Excel was a huge improvement over 123. Originally released on the Mac, it was the first ‘modern’ spreadsheet with the kind of GUI and advanced graphics you see today. Whereas 123 was still a DOS application, and was stuck with a ‘/’ command system and a clunky tab and arrow key navigation method for getting around the sheet. I think Excel also initroduced pivot tables and eventually a scripting language. The Lotus boys made some critical errors, including not porting their software to Windows for a long time. By the time they did, Excel owned the spreadsheet market.
That’s not my recollection. Excel and Word were designed by Microsoft to integrate with Windows (a graphic interface that imitated Mac). I don’t think they were introduced for the Mac until much later. 123 and Wordperfect were DOS based and then came out with releases (Lotus 123 for Windows, Wordperfect for Windows) that adapted to the graphic interface. They had problems because Microsoft didn’t want them to integrate well with Windows and were basically uncooperative. They put them behind the 8 ball, so to speak. That way Microsoft could sell Excel, Word and Windows as a seamless system. For that reason a lot of businesses adopted it. They went with the package. The rest is history but the fact is that the marketing power of Microsoft superceded Lotus 123 and Wordperfect even though they were better products.
Excel was released for the Mac first in 1985. What else were you saying?
Some do, apparently. Just a couple of weeks ago my sister-in-law came by telling me how much she loves Peachtree. As a tired mom, few things about attending college please her, but Peachtree sure struck a chord. Never heard of it myself, but anything that made her that happy isn’t half bad in my book.