really a two-dimensional...
really a two-dimensional layout of words and numbers. If you look at what we
had in all our cases at Harvard Business School, at documents you have in business,
you have tables of things, but they’re organized in a way that is appropriate
to the data, and there’s a lot of other text, and the text is just as important as
the numbers.
Dan Bricklin 75
I took this general layout idea of the word processing and computerized
typesetting world, together with the calculating world of APL and Basic and
stuff, to the needs of business, where you need to be able to ad hoc throw anything
together and make changes. That’s where the idea for the spreadsheet
came from. Then through business school, I met this publisher, Dan Fylstra, of
Personal Software, and his partner, Peter Jennings. Dan was a second-year
Harvard MBA student when I first met him.
When I started programming, he had graduated and was running this business
selling software on cassettes out of his apartment in Allston, Mass. He was
looking for new stuff, like a checkbook program. I actually prototyped VisiCalc
on one of his machines over one of the vacation weekends. I went to his place
and wrote a prototype in Basic. Then we started discussing that they would
publish it. As MBAs (both he and his partner were MBAs), they understood the
value of this thing. They already had a need listed in their list of things they
wanted of financial stuff. And they were looking at other financial forecasting
tools, but this also would do checkbooks and other stuff. So they knew they
could sell it as that; they knew that they would use it. And we made a deal to
produce it.
I had already prototyped it and said what it would do, but I didn’t have time
to program it since I was in school. So, since Bob was out of school, he would
program it.
Livingston: You did it over one weekend? When was that?
Bricklin: The fall of ’78.
Livingston: You just wanted to see if it would work?
Bricklin: No, I had been thinking of the idea; I had daydreamed about it. I had
actually done a prototype on Harvard’s computer system that was available to us
as students. As part of the prototyping, I came up with what we have today: the
A-B-C 1-2-3 type of thing, the columns and rows ways of indicating things;
the idea of having a formula on what we call the contents line that tells you what
you’re pointing to; moving around where you could move the highlight around
from cell to cell—that whole thing. The idea and some of the prototyping had
been done. The actual trying it on a personal computer was written in Basic to
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