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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.
closed TED
