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” for personal computers:
businesses bought Apple IIs just to use it.
Unfortunately, VisiCalc was not produced by a company organized like a
modern startup. VisiCalc was developed by Software Arts, but distributed by
Daniel Fylstra’s Personal Software (later renamed VisiCorp), which paid royalties
to Software Arts. Friction between the two culminated in a lawsuit in
September 1983—just as Lotus 1-2-3 hit the market. The distraction proved fatal.
As a business, Software Arts’s fall was as fast as its rise, but it had more
influence than many longer-lived companies. Bricklin and Frankston’s ideas live
on in all the software we use today.
Livingston: How did you know Bob?
Bricklin: I met Bob when I was a freshman at MIT. I was working in the labs as
my student job—because a really good way to learn an area in college is to work
on a real project in one of the labs. I worked at the Multics project, which was a
major project in the history of operating systems. Out of it came the Unix system
and the 386-style chipset and a whole lot of things about how we do software
and operating systems today. The first job I was given was to make some
modifications and finish the work of this other guy, who had just graduated, in
his bachelor’s thesis. And that was Bob Frankston.
Bob’s thesis was a project called Limited Service System. We used time
sharing then; we all shared the same computer over a terminal. The Limited
Service System was a way to throttle your usage so that nobody would use more
than a certain amount, so they could just give it away for free and know that
nobody would hog more than a certain percentage—because this one system
was being shared that could handle maybe 50 users or 100 users, and this is for
the whole campus.
Many of us working at that project were undergraduates or graduate students.
Those of us who were young and single would get together socially, too.
Bob had a car and lived off campus. He would drive us places, so we all got to

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