Term of the Moment
engineer
Definition: VisiCalc
The first electronic spreadsheet. Introduced in 1978 for the Apple II, VisiCalc was conceived by Harvard student Dan Bricklin and programmed by his friend Bob Frankston. VisiCalc was a command-driven program that was followed by SuperCalc, MultiPlan, Lotus 1-2-3 and eventually Excel, which dominates the spreadsheet market today. Spreadsheets were also implemented on minicomputers and mainframes, and it all started with VisiCalc.
The Way It Looked
VisiCalc helped launch the personal computer industry and was almost entirely responsible for the Apple II being used in business. Tens of thousands of $3,000 Apple computers were bought to run the $150 VisiCalc program. See Apple II. (Image courtesy of IBM.)