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How many of you have used
an electronic spreadsheet,

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like Microsoft Excel?
Very good.

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Now how many of you have run a business
with a spreadsheet by hand,

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like my dad did for his small
printing business in Philadelphia?

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A lot less. Well, that's the way
it was done for hundreds of years.

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In early 1978, I started working
on an idea that eventually became VisiCalc.

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And the next year it shipped
running on something new

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called an Apple II Personal Computer.

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You could tell that things
had really changed when six years later,

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the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial
that assumed you knew what VisiCalc was

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and maybe even were using it.
Steve Jobs back in 1990 said that

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spreadsheets propelled
the industry forward.

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VisiCalc propelled the success of Apple
more than any other single event.

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On a more personal note, Steve said
that if VisiCalc had been written

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for some other computer,
you'd be interviewing

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somebody else right now.

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So, VisiCalc was instrumental in getting
personal computers on business desks.

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How did it come about? What was it?

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What did I go through
to make it be what it was?

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Well, I first learned to program
back in 1966, when I was 15 --

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just a couple months after
this photo was taken.

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Few high schoolers had access
to computers in those days

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but through luck
and an awful lot of perseverance,

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I was able to get
computer time around the city.

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After sleeping in the mud at Woodstock,
I went off the MIT to go to college,

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where to make money,
I worked on the Multics Project.

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Now Multics was a trailblazing
interactive time-sharing system.

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Have you heard of the
Lenix ad Unix operating systems?

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They came from Multics.
I worked on the Multics versions

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of what are known as
interpreted computer languages,

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that are used by people
in non-computer fields

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to do their calculations while seated
at a computer terminal.

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After I graduated from MIT,

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I went to work for
Digital Equipment Corporation.

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At DEC, I worked on software for
the new area of computerized typesetting.

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I helped newspapers replace
their reporters' typewriters

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with computer terminals.

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I'd write software
and then I'd go out in the field

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to places like the Kansas City Star where
I would train users and get feedback.

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Now this was real world experience
that was quite different

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from what I saw in the lab at MIT.