see is what you get—with a separate location that showed the contents and all
the attributes of it at the top, with the menu tree being shown at the top. We
had very little memory space to give you in the way of help, but if you hit /, it
listed all the letters you could type. If you typed a letter, it would give you the
name of the command that you were doing and any options. So basically, it was
always prompting you with what you could do next, once you learned to...

a reference card up, which my father actually helped me do—my father’s printing
business typeset and printed that whole thing for us. An awful lot of people
learned the product from the reference card.
It had the ability to lock—because, remember, you had a very small screen,
40 characters by 24/25 lines on the Apple II—it allowed you to lock columns or
rows on the screen. They call them panes now, I think, in Excel; you could lock
the panes. We called them titles. You could lock the title area, and, as you
...

then convert it to other machines.
Bob wrote most of the code, and then this person we hired, Steve
Lawrence, and myself wrote the rest of the code. I got the transcendental functions
to work, the sine and cosine, stuff like that. There were bugs in divide, and
Steve got those things working. We had the beta version of it ready, I think, in
the late summer, together with a self-running demo version of it that was actually
macro-driven—that basically had a long macro that would just run that was
just keystrokes driving...

he would run off to Typotech and make changes, and he’d literally cut and paste
the results.
The final contract we signed—because it was up until late at night, making
some changes about advances and royalties and future versions, I don’t know,
Dan Bricklin 83
whatever we were doing—we needed a copy of it, and it was late at night; there
were no all-night things. Bob had a copier. In the old days, Xerox’s patents
hadn’t run out, and people didn’t have Xerox machines at home. We had a thing
which had...

VisiCalc; it was a mockup that they did) with Charlie Chaplin pushing a button.
When Apple ran an ad, they had Dick Cavett—who had never done ads on TV
before—and he would push a button and up would come VisiCalc on the
screen. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing, I’m sure, but I thought,
“Wow! That was really cool! Dick Cavett!”
One thing that really hit home was when I was going back to the airport
from a conference where Ross Perot had spoken—he was the head of EDS. A
...