Microsoft Excel

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In 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created a new application for the Apple II computer. They called it “VisiCalc”. It was a grid of cells that you could input numbers and text into and then run calculations on by reference to cell coordinates. VisiCalc was, of course, the first spreadsheet program. It is the primordial ancestor of that beast we all now know and love as Microsoft Excel. The brilliant innovation was to separate the actual data — the numbers and text in the cells that you wanted to calculate, from the calculation operation, which referenced the just cell coordinates, not the data inside the cell itself. You could change the data without changing the calculation operations.

It might not have seemed much in 1979, but it would revolutionise business computing. While not nearly as intuitive as the “desktop” — there was no graphic user interface or anything like that — VisiCalc was a much purer expression of what a personal computer could do. It promised even modest undertakings a powerful means of storing, augmenting, filtering, analysing and manipulating unprecedented amounts of information as structured data.

End-user applications

VisiCalc was more than just a glorified calculator: it was its own programming language: you could, effectively, build your own little programmes in it to automate tasks.

Users quickly became dependent on these little home-made programmes to manage substantial strategic risks. This became a live issue for financial services regulators when they realised many of the financial products that blew up in the global financial crisis were managed “on the desk” by “end user developed applications” running in Excel that no one understood, since the people who had built them had been fired.

See also

• Desktop
• Microsoft Office
• Turing machine