Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet

How many of you have used
an electronic spreadsheet,

like Microsoft Excel?
Very good.

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

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

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

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

And the next year it shipped
running on something new

called an Apple II Personal Computer.

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

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

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

spreadsheets propelled
the industry forward.

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

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

for some other computer,
you'd be interviewing

somebody else right now.

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

How did it come about? What was it?

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

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

just a couple months after
this photo was taken.

Few high schoolers had access
to computers in those days

but through luck
and an awful lot of perseverance,

I was able to get
computer time around the city.

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

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

Now Multics was a trailblazing
interactive time-sharing system.

Have you heard of the
Lenix ad Unix operating systems?

They came from Multics.
I worked on the Multics versions

of what are known as
interpreted computer languages,

that are used by people
in non-computer fields

to do their calculations while seated
at a computer terminal.

After I graduated from MIT,

I went to work for
Digital Equipment Corporation.

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

I helped newspapers replace
their reporters' typewriters

with computer terminals.

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

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

Now this was real world experience
that was quite different

from what I saw in the lab at MIT.