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 used already for
something close to their problem and then understand what it is. Many people
who saw the spreadsheet with an example, if the example wasn’t in their field,
they couldn’t make the leap. Because they’re not programmers in their mind.
But, if you showed it to somebody where it clicked, either because they
understood the general-purpose nature and could apply it to their own needs,
or you showed them an example, like financial forecasting or something that
they did, and they knew the other tools in the world, they got very excited. If
you showed it to a computer person who didn’t have those needs, they’d say,
“That’s kind of cool, but what’s so special about that? I could just do it in Basic.”
Now, there were those that hadn’t seen as interactive a computer before,
weren’t as aware of word processing and some of the other things, and, when
they saw it, it really opened up their minds to what you could do interactively
with computers. Jean-Louis Gass?e, who went to Apple, is one of the people
who says that.
There were those people—not that many, but enough that it got a lot of
people going in computer software. And then there were people—the general
public—who thought computers could do everything, and they weren’t at all
surprised. They’d say, “Well, of course, computers can do so much more than
that. What’s special?” Luckily for us, the people who funded things—the MBA
types got it, the investment banker types got it, because this was something they
would need. And that made them get the personal computer.
Livingston: Did it drive sales for the Apple II along with VisiCalc?
Bricklin: Well, for Apple, yeah. Eventually we could track Apple sales by how
many we sold. But the first year we were only selling a thousand units a month.
Livingston: Who were the very first users?
Bricklin: There was Al Sneider, locally, who was at Laventhol & Horwath,
which is an accounting firm, and he started pushing them to use personal computers.
They did a lot of accounting for the gaming business. They actually used

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