Dan Bricklin and his friend Bob Frankston founded
Software Arts in 1979 to produce VisiCalc, the first
electronic spreadsheet. Spreadsheets used to be made
on paper. As a student at Harvard Business School,
Bricklin thought how convenient it would be if they
could be made on desktop computers instead. He
wrote a prototype in Basic over a weekend, and then
he and Frankston set about turning it into a product.
When their first release shipped in October 1979,
it ignited the personal computer software revolution.
VisiCalc was the “killer app”...

know Bob really well.
Bob and I always wanted to found a business together. We both had parents
who were entrepreneurs, so the idea of running your own business was a
normal thing. There are people who come from backgrounds where they’re
used to working for a company, and they couldn’t dream of doing it themselves
and not having that safety net. When your parents and family are entrepreneurs,
you know it’s nothing special. I worked at big businesses and I worked at
small businesses beforehand, so the idea of starting your own...

time-sharing time, and he used it late at night, when it was cheap. I mean really
late. Basically, he slept during the day.
Livingston: That was at MIT, right?
Bricklin: We used MIT’s Multics system, the one we worked on.
Livingston: Did they mind?
Bricklin: No. We paid for it. Luckily it took a few months to be billed. So
money went into that, and Bob had some money and was able to pay for it.
Eventually we borrowed some money from relatives, because we wanted to buy
our own computer. We...

really a two-dimensional layout of words and numbers. If you look at what we
had in all our cases at Harvard Business School, at documents you have in business,
you have tables of things, but they’re organized in a way that is appropriate
to the data, and there’s a lot of other text, and the text is just as important as
the numbers.
Dan Bricklin 75
I took this general layout idea of the word processing and computerized
typesetting world, together with the calculating world of APL and Basic and
stuff, to...

see what it would feel like. And then we actually programmed it in assembly
language starting the winter of ’78/’79.
Livingston: When you first wrote the prototype that you did in Basic, what
surprised you most?
Bricklin: I had originally wanted the thing to use a mouse. There was no mouse
on the Apple II at the time, so I was using the game paddle and turning it. But
the way I was doing it with the game paddles, the cursor was just too unstable.
So I switched to the arrow keys, which...