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 about those things, and that affected the
design quite a bit, because I had a lot of experience in that user interface world.
I had also trained people on my product, so I had a lot of experience training
people. So I knew what it was like, what people learn to use, etc.
The challenge was, how do you express the value you’re typing in, the formula
you want to calculate, its location, and the precision of the decimal points,
and how wide are the columns and all this stuff? Is it an integer, is it a floating
point number? How do you specify all that? In computerdom in those days,
that was the most yicky stuff of any computer language—the format statement
in Fortran, and COBOL’s pictures and all that. It was just such a mess. How do
you get the output specification of how it looks?
I ended up with WYSIWYG, like people had done in typesetting. How do
you marry that with calculating? There I came up with use of the grid as a way
to be able to name things. The big problem for me was, how do you name
things? How do you name the value? In the old days, it’s like, variable name
equals expression, right? That’s how computers work. Well, this was, “What’s
the variable name going to be?”
Today it seems so natural: you use A1. Well, first of all, it was A1, not 1
comma 1. It is too many keystrokes, it’s not normal for people, and there’s a
whole lot of problems with it. By going to the map coordinate type of thing—
A1, G7, or something like that—that was something I knew regular people
would understand. But it also parsed well: anything that starts with a letter was
obviously a variable name, because numbers always start with a number, or a
plus and a minus or something. So it made it really easy to make it obvious what
you were typing in. So, if you said 1 + A1, I knew exactly what it was. But, if I
said 1 + 1,1?
So coming up with that idea, coming up with the fact that you’d be editing
the output as the input—you’d basically be inputting into the output; what you