TIME Magazine’s “Machine of the Year”

The Apple II was quite a success when it was introduced in 1977 with sales of US$770,000 in its first year. Its growth over the next few years, however, was tremendous. Revenues hit $7.9 million in its second year of operation and $49 million in 1979. Its founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were soon […]

Lotus 1-2-3 – A Star is Born

It was during the November of 1982 on the giant floor of the Comdex show in Las Vegas that Lotus 1-2-3 would first make its mark. While VisiCalc for the Apple II had shown both the viability of digital spreadsheets and the new “microcomputers,” Lotus 1-2-3 showed that spreadsheets would become indispensable for modern organizations […]

Lotus Spreadsheets – Part 4 – Symbols and Lists as Administrative Technologies

Spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 were designed to facilitate organizational coordination and activity by setting up relationships between symbolic and material resources. Using a grid structure, spreadsheets achieve their efficacy by combining the following components: symbolic representation; lists; tables; cells and; formulas. In this post I will examine how the first two components, symbolic representations and […]

Steven Levy’s “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge”

I have been developing a number of posts on the digital spreadsheet as a meaning-making technology. They have had a major impact on organizations and forming what I call spreadsheet capitalism; the particular way organizations have been enabled by this technology since the late 1970s. Spreadsheets have become central to the information practices, including accounting […]