Microsoft Excel
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JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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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 manipulate — the numbers and text in the cells — from the logical operations you wanted to manipulate them with — quasi-mathematical formulae — which referenced just the coordinates of the cells holding the data, not the data itself. You could therefore change the data without upsetting the calculation parameters. VisiCalc established a rudimentary form of programming language. A spreadsheet is a sort of programme. This may seem redolent of a smart contract, by the way. That is because it is. But let us not be distracted.
It might not have seemed much in 1979, but VisiCalc and its heirs 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.
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.