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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 the first spreadsheet program: a primitive ancestor to that beast we all now know and love as Microsoft Excel. VisiCalc’s brilliant innovation was to separate the data you wanted to run operations on — the numbers and text in the cells — from the operations themselves, which referenced the just cell coordinates, not the data inside the cell. You could therefore change the data without changing the calculation operations. Excel was a rudimentary form of programming language.

It might not have seemed much in 1979, but it would revolutionise business computing. While not nearly as intuitive as the Alto’s “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.