No installer, no uninstaller, no DLLs, just a fully functional, no frills spreadsheet program. You get a 27,520 byte MS-DOS executable (actually a. The first thing that strikes you about VisiCalc is its size, or rather, lack of it. I wish more software companies would put their heritage online. I really like online software museums, where you can download the important exhibits, as it were. VisiCalc is a free download from Dan Bricklin's site, for Lotus-who now own the copyright-have given permission. What's forgotten is that at that time patents for software were almost unheard of.
People speculate that Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston must have been stupid not to patent their creation, for surely it would have made them astonishingly rich. One of the most famous facts about VisiCalc was that it was not patented. It was a phenomenal success and was ported to numerous other platforms, including the new IBM Personal Computer in 1981. a program that makes people buy the hardware just so they can run that software. VisiCalc became the world's first killer application i.e. was released into the world of 1979 for the Apple II-or Apple ][ for the cognescenti-computer. I remember it, I got a train set for Christmas. That time was 1979 and I was five years old. A time when a spreadsheet was a piece of paper with a grid on it that accountants used.
Imagine a time before Microsoft Excel, before Lotus 1-2-3, before Windows, before MS-DOS even. If you're not familiar with VisiCalc then you should know that it was the world's first electronic spreadsheet. I thought it would be interesting and instructive to take a look at a piece of software that is not only twenty three years old, but that also defined a market. VisiCalc for the IBM PC was first released in 1981.
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