VisiPlot. That was important because it provided a way to actually make graphs
out of spreadsheet data, which was an obvious piece of functionality.
Bob Frankston had developed something called the data interchange format,
and VisiPlot was one of the first other software applications to support it.
I’d worked with Bob on that—he played the lead role, far and away. But while
there was a way of moving data between these two programs, it was really
cumbersome. There were no hard drives in those days. Everything was on
floppy disks, which had limited capacity. And furthermore, VisiCalc had a
copy-protected floppy disk to prevent piracy. So if you wanted to make a graph,
you had to boot up VisiCalc, you would make your spreadsheet, and then you
would save a file in this special data interchange format to the second floppy
Mitchell Kapor 91
drive—you had to have a second drive because you couldn’t save it on the first
drive. Then you had to quit out of VisiCalc completely and then start up
VisiPlot and then read in the file and then you could see the graph. If you
wanted to look at another graph and you hadn’t saved the data, you had to
repeat the whole process.
I could think of several ways to make this process less cumbersome, one of
which would be to put both programs on a single disk. I raised the issue with
the guys at Software Arts who did VisiCalc and they weren’t interested in it at
all. In fact, at various times I raised a number of ideas with the publisher about
combining the programs and they weren’t interested at all.
Why weren’t they interested? The people who did VisiCalc had serious
technical backgrounds and a bunch of computer science training. They knew
what they were doing and they had the hot product. I had no credentials or
background, at best sort of minor league success. So I don’t think they really
saw me as an equal. And the publisher was even worse in my view, in that they
were firmly convinced, between the venture capitalists and the people they
brought in, that they knew how to build this thing into a big business. And they
saw me, when I was there as a product manager, as an annoyance—as a marginal
person without experience or credentials who was kind of a pest. And I
suppose I was kind of a pest.
So they had no interest in doing more stuff with me. They were trying to
figure out how to technically get rid of me. And I took advantage of that fact.
I didn’t like it, but I took advantage of it. The royalty rate that VisiCalc was getting

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