VisiCalc on the Apple II

I bought a used VisiCalc box on eBay to run it on my restored Apple II and experience what it was like to use it back in a day on original hardware.

The quality of documentation is something I haven’t see in the last decade or two. It comes in a binder, well organized, thought out with good examples and no expectation of prior knowledge. It’s a joy to read. The only documentation I read thats better than this was the original Apple II Basic manual.

And the best part is it’s all keyboard based. Is there something like vim but for spreadsheets?

One of my most vivid memories from youth is of the accountant who pulled up to a computer store I was hanging out in and announced to the clerk:

>I want a Visicalc.

After explaining that he would need a computer to run it and that the guy did not yet own one, the clerk then proceeded to put together a purchase which was not quite one (or more! Dual-Disk Drive setup) of every Apple product in the store, incl. a 132 column printer and an 80 col. display.

After ringing it up (for which the guy wrote out a check), I was enlisted to help load things into his black Trans Am and he drove off into the sunset.

The thing which most clearly echoed that after was using Lotus Improv on a NeXT Cube --- these days, I either use Google Docs, or pyspread --- really wish Flexisheet would compile under GNUstep or that there was some nice, elegant, multi-dimensional spreadsheet option with a clear, easy-to-understand formula pane (which was the big advantage of Improv --- all formulae were gathered in one place).

"If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer, you'd be interviewing somebody else right now!"

- Steve Jobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o

In the summer of 1981, I was a high school student who had been programming in BASIC for three years. I got a summer job at a company to write some utility programs in BASIC on an Apple II.

One program tracked all the land leasing they did, including location, date of expiration, number of square feet, cost/sqft. Once that was done I did some other programs. I went off to college and brought the program listings (in dot matrix greenbar paper) with me. Oh, I was paid $5/hour, which I just looked up would be $17.81/hour now. Then again, I burned up $5 gas and two hours of driving a day, and $5 at the cafeteria.

Every so often I'd get a call from the guy who used the program asking for a fix or enhancement. He didn't know how to program, and I didn't have a computer, so I'd just dictate "between lines 1280 and 1290, type "1291 IF F2 < 100 THEN 1320:F2=B2+1" or whatever.

I went back to the same job the next summer and they had visicalc. I wrote everything as visicalc spreadsheets on the same Apple II, and taught the user how it all worked. It took 10% of the time and I never got calls again -- the user could figure out how to tweak things.

The main problem was the Apple II could only produce 40 columns of text, which really sucked. You could buy a card which could put out 80x24 but for some reason they didn't want to spend the money even though it seemed like it would have paid for itself in faster navigation.

Hard to over state how important Visicalc was. I was a Supercalc user under CP/M, really great software. "A superpower" in its day.

I had to beg to get the family to buy an Apple ][, but then someone handed me a pirated copy of VisiCalc and my dad wouldn't let it go. He was a recently minted MBA that had spent years grinding with SPSS and VisiCalc was a magical thing.

After that we always had nice printers and lots of storage as he started a consultancy and drove it all from that Apple ][. He even wrote documents in the spreadsheet, he refused all attempts to move to a proper word processor. Lots of fond memories there.

One of the highlights of my work in tech was meeting someone I had read about in many computing history books, Bob Frankston, who dropped in for the Web 1.0 Conf at MIT Media Lab years ago. I was indifferent to the coffee choice at the event so I grabbed light toast, but he preferred dark roast coffee and politely but intently requested dark roast, so the next day I made sure we had both. That's where I learned that I preferred it too and I've been drinking dark roast ever since. Thanks Bob.

I wish I was in the room when he tried to demo Visicalc to the Atari developers, IIRC, the Atari documentary implied that a lot of them showed up to the demo stoned and were perhaps a little confused why they were being shown the demo.

If you're interested in the history of VisiCalc:

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app

Sometimes I wonder if instead of struggling with office suites, I'd be better off running VisiCalc in an emulator. Low memory usage, high portability, and you know they're not going to change the UI on you.

Borland Quattro Pro Spreadsheet

40+ years ago..

Great keyboard recorder language! Edit to branch, compare, move entries, auto mixing randomly placed consecutive primes in a matrix array, where sums on columns, or products on columns, so all columns would become semi-equal, I recall often surprising difference plus/minus 1 for sums. Like the 1st pass of a magic square.

It was fun to make, and fun to watch, much slower back then.

It's not particularly subject related, but that CRT filter applied to a 4x pixel multiplied image is just wrong.

What about the Mac? In 1988 I was using something that must have been called MacCalc or similar. It was neither Excel nor Lotus.