WEBVTT

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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 is quite different

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than what I saw in the lab at MIT.
After that, I was project leader

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of the software for DEC's
first word processor, again a new field.

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Like with typesetting, the important thing
was crafting a user interface that was

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both natural and efficient
for non-computer people to use.

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After I was at DEC, I went to work
for a small company that made

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microprocessor based electronic
cash registers for the fast food industry.

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But, I had always wanted to start
a company with my friend Bob Frankston

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that I met on the Multics project at MIT.

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So I decided to go back to school to learn
as much as I could about business.

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And in the Fall of 1977, I entered the
MBA program at Harvard Business School.

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I was one of a few students who
had a background in computer programming.

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There's a picture of me from the yearbook
sitting in the front row. Now at Harvard,

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we learned by the case method.
we do about three cases a day.

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Cases consist of up to a few dozen pages
describing a particular business situation.

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They often have exhibits, and exhibits
often have words and numbers

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laid out in ways that make sense
for the particular situation.

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There usually all somewhat different.
Here's my homework.

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Again, numbers, words, laid out
in ways that made sense.

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Lots of calculations.
We got really close to our calculators.

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In fact, here's my calculator.

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For Halloween, I went
dressed up as a calculator.

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At the beginning of each class,
the professor would call on somebody

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to present the case.

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What they would do, is they would explain
what was going on and then dictate

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information that the professor
would transcribe onto the mini

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motorized blackboard
in the front of the class

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and then we'd have a discussion.

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The frustrating thing is when
you've done all of your homework,

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you come in the next day only to find out
that you made an error and all

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of the other numbers you did were wrong,
and you couldn't participate as well.

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And we were marked by class participation.

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So, sitting there with 87 other people
in the class, I got to daydream a lot.

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Most programmers in those days worked on
mainframes, building things like

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inventory systems and payroll systems
and bill paying systems, but I had worked

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on interactive word processing
and on-demand personal computation.

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Instead of thinking about
paper print outs and punch cards,

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I imagined a magic blackboard
that if you erased one number

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and wrote a new thing in,
all of the other numbers

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would automatically change,
like word processing with numbers.

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I imagined that my calculator had
mouse hardware on the bottom of it

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and a head-up display like in a fighter plane.

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And I could type some numbers in and circle it,
and press the sum button.

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And right in the middle of a negotiation,
I'd be able to get the answer.

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Now I just had to take my fantasy
and turn it into reality.

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My father taught me about prototyping.

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He showed me mock-ups
that he'd make to figure out the placement

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on the page for the things for brochures
that he was printing.

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And he'd use it to get feedback
from customers and okays before

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he sent the job off to the presses.

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The act of making a simple, working
version of what you're trying to build,

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forces you to uncover key problems.

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And it lets you find solutions to
those problems much less expensively.

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So I decided to build a prototype.
I went to a video terminal connected to

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Harvard's time-sharing system
and got to work.

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One of the first problems
that I ran into was:

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how do you represent values in formulas?

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Let me show you what I mean.

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I thought that you would point somewhere,
type in some words,

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then type in somewhere else,
and put in some numbers

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and some more numbers,
point where you want the answer.

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And then point to the first, press minus;
point to the second, and get the result.

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The problem was:
what should I put in the formula?

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It had to be something
the computer what knew to put in

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and if you looked at the formula,
you needed to know

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where on the screen it referred to.

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So the first thing I thought was
the programmer way of doing it,

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the first time you pointed to somewhere,
the computer would ask you

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to type in a unique name. 
It became pretty clear, pretty fast that

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that was going to be too tedious.

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The computer had to automatically make up
the name and put it inside.

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So I thought, why not make it be the order
in which you create them.

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I tried that. Value 1, Value 2.
Pretty quickly I saw that if you had more

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than a few values, you'd never remember
on the screen where things were.

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Then I said, why not instead of
allowing you to put values anywhere,

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I'll restrict you to a grid?
Then when you pointed to a cell,

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the computer could put
the row and column in as a name.

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And, if I did it like a map and put ABC
across the top and numbers along the side,

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if you saw B7 in a formula, you'd know
exactly where it was on the screen.

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If you had to type the formula yourself,
you'd know what to do.

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Restricting you to a grid
helped solve my problem.:

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It also opened up new capabilities,
like the ability to have ranges of cells.

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But it wasn't too restrictive --

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you could still put any value,
any formula, in any cell.

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And that's the way we do it to this day,
almost 40 years later.

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My friend Bob and I decided that we were
going to build this product together.

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I did more work figuring out exactly how
the program was supposed to behave.


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I wrote a reference card
to act as documentation.

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It also helped me ensure that
the user interface I was defining

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could be explained concisely and clearly
to regular people.

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Bob worked in the attic of the apartment
he rented in Arlington, Massachusettes.

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This is the inside of the attic.

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Bob bought time on the MIT Multics System

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to write computer code
on a terminal like this: