in the fall of ’78 to produce this product and they would sell it, we needed a
business.
We incorporated the business on January 2, 1979, and then we negotiated
the deal with Personal Software. We were developing the product, but before it
was announced we had already agreed on the general terms. The actual specific
contract wasn’t signed until the night before we announced it at Ben Rosen’s
conference. We had our lawyer (a general lawyer) negotiating on our side, and
we had a publishing lawyer on the other side, I think,...

magazines like Byte or Creative Computing) just wasn’t mentioned. I think
Forbes finally mentioned it in a comparison of new computers—did it have
VisiCalc or not? So it sort of was missed.
People who saw it, who needed it, got it. Sorry, no—some of the people who
needed it got it. You have to be a person who is able to look at a generalpurpose
tool and be able to think, “How would I use that to solve my problem?”
Most people are not that way. They look for a tool that is being...

VisiCalc to figure out how to lay out a casino and where to put which slot
machines, I’m told. There were doctors who had bought personal computers
because they thought it would be kind of cool, who used it for, I think, anesthesiology
calculations in open-heart surgery.
We got cards back where people said what they used it with; we asked them
in their registration card. They were people who liked technology and were
enamored with the personal computer, who knew business. But, as I say, only a
thousand units a month. It...

world, when we invented things for word processing, because when we did
Dan Bricklin 79
word processing at DEC in the mid-’70s, there weren’t many screen-based word
processors. A lot of them were page-based, which meant that you edited one
page at a time, and if something was more than a page, you had to cut it and
paste it onto the beginning of another page, because they were thinking like
paper. In fact, some of them had things like platens to turn to make the paper
go up and down, and you...

Day one I wasn’t thinking computer-like. The whole idea was not to think
computer-like. We used decimal arithmetic so it would act just like a calculator.
We didn’t use binary arithmetic, which might end up with some anomalies that
you might not understand.
I had Professor Jackson at the business school, and I had her look at the
prototypes as we were doing it (she consulted to CEOs of big companies). She
said, “You’re competing against the back of the envelope. It’s got to be really
easy to use.” I was constantly worrying...