The big computer mainframes of the 1960s and even the minicomputers of the time were not accessible enough to provide the type of direct experience needed to play with the numbers by making multiple changes and producing various scenarios that would make the spreadsheets so valuable later on. It was the microprocessor-enabled PCs that made possible the successive lineage of major digital spreadsheet applications – VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft’s Excel, and Google Sheets that would transform modern organizational practices.

It was only after government-sponsored miniaturization projects delivered the microprocessor and the counter-culture delivered the Apple computer that the technology developed to the point where it could provide a platform for the interactive spreadsheet. The Cold War’s “Space Race” and associated nuclear strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) provided the needed investments to transform vacuum tubes into solid-state circuits that continued the miniaturization of transistor technology into the 1970s.

Intel eventually developed the microprocessor, a digital switching device on a silicon “chip.” Apple and then IBM provided the smaller, more accessible “micro”-computing platforms that both demystified and democratized computing power needed for the successful use of digital spreadsheets. The first Apple II computers went on sale in June, 1977 with VisiCalc using the MOS 6502 (later Synertek) microprocessor.

The Microcomputer’s First “Killer App”

While spreadsheets were, in many ways, old technology, they emerged in a new way when a Harvard business student designed an electronic version. Drawing on standard paper-based accounting ledgers, Dan Bricklin, with his friend Bob Frankston, created a number processor on a microcomputer where figures could be displayed and calculated instantaneously and refigured each time a change needed to be made. Frankston called it “VisiCalc” as a shortened version of Visible Calculator.

This spreadsheet program was made in response to a task Bricklin had been assigned in an MBA class to determine the financial consequences of the acquisition of one company by another company. This process usually required long hours of tediously writing in numbers on paper ledgers and then doing the calculations. Then, the results often had to be entered into another spreadsheet. If a variable needed to be changed, the entire process would be repeated with the new figures. Bricklin, though, had extensive experience in the computer industry. He had an intuition that the process could be computerized and that numbers could be changed quickly like a word processor, so he sought out Frankston to pursue an idea he had to automate the process.

Bricklin and Frankston had computer science degrees from MIT and extensive experience in the industry. They met in the late 1960s while working for the Multics group at Project Mac, the first timesharing program. Bricklin went on to DEC where he was the project manager for WPS-8, one of the first word processing programs. In 1976, he left for a job with FasFax who made microprocessor-based cash registers. The next year he began his MBA studies where, faced with tedious calculations on green ledger sheets, he developed his ideas for an electronic spreadsheet. After getting a Masters degree in Engineering at MIT in 1974, Frankston went to work for Financial Information Service (later called Interactive Data Corporation or IDC) and later worked as a computer consultant. They would soon team up to create one of the most innovative programs in computer history.

As the story goes, Bricklin had two choices in 1978 for a homework assignment, either do it by hand or use a timesharing system; but he dreamed of another option: “Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse, and imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and the answer 10% will be fine!”[5] Although the technology needed for this type of computer environment was many years away, excitement was building over the potential of the newly released microcomputer.

Bricklin and Franston renewed their friendship and started to work on their “visible calculator” with an Apple II lent to them by a third collaborator, Dan Fylstra, who had started a small software company called Personal Software after graduating from Harvard Business School a couple of years before Bricklin.

Bricklin conceived of his computerized approach to complex calculations by studying a matrix used for production planning. In one of his business classes that dealt with production techniques, Bricklin discovered how “some companies used long blackboards (sometimes stretching across several rooms) that were divided into a matrix of rows and columns. Each row and column had a specific definition, and calculations were made based on the contents of each cell (the intersection of a row and a column). If the value of one cell changed, the values of any cell that made use of the first cell’s value also had to be changed. Because this was all written on a blackboard, the results had to be checked and re-checked to make sure that something hadn’t been missed when changes were made during a planning session.”

Even though the computer could not display the entire matrix at once, the video screen could be used as a window on a part of the matrix, and this window could be moved at will to view any part of it. Best of all, the computer could keep track of all the calculations between the various cells, making sure that a change made in one place would be adequately reflected in the result of a calculation in another place.

Steven Levy. in an astute (1984) article called “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge” suggested that the digital spreadsheet was a social innovation comparable to the development of bookkeeping’s double entry accounting formula. This system of books used in early accounting raised the status of merchants and began to solidify the status of capitalism as it provided a structured narrative that testified to the honesty of merchants. It separated debits and credits and allowed merchants to get a new understanding of their business in a way that could assist decision-making and be audited and evaluated for investment.

The spreadsheet offered an even more sophisticated view of the business or organization by presenting a “numerical reality” that combined accounting with a more sophisticated way of managing resources: inventory, accounts receivables, or expenses such as salaries, rent payments, interest on loans, etc.

Spreadsheets allow a computer user to perform specific types of analyses to observe, rank, and explore new types of financial relationships along with possible ‘what-if’ scenarios. For the spreadsheet to help test various scenarios, it must recalculate the entire table each time a single change is made, allowing for multiple calculations within a short time period. Accounting activities that previously were tedious and required numerous hours of writing and calculating were reduced to mere minutes. The computerized spreadsheet helped spark a new economic dynamism, a versatile and easily figural electronic money that set off an explosion of new “paper” wealth.

Notes

[1] Mattessich and Galassi credit assistants Tom Schneider and Paul Zitlau with the development of the first actual computerized spreadsheet based on an algebraic model written by Mattessich. It was reported in “The History of Spreadsheet: From Matrix Accounting to Budget Simulation and Computerization”, a paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Accounting Historians in Madrid, August 2000. See Mattessich, Richard, and Giuseppe Galassi. “History of the Spreadsheet: From Matrix Accounting to Budget Simulation and Computerization.” Accounting and History: A Selection of Papers Presented at the 8th World Congress of Accounting Historians: Madrid-Spain, 19–21 July 2000. Asociación Española de Contabilidad y Administración de Empresas, AECA, 2000.See also George J. Murphy’s “Mattessich, Richard V. (1922-),” in Michael Chatfield and Richard Vangermeersch, eds., The History of Accounting–An International Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing Co., Inc, 1997): 405.
[2] Levy, S. (1989) “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge,” in Computers in the Human Context: Information Technology, Productivity, and People. Tom Forester (ed.) Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
[2] There is to some extent a poverty of language to describe the functions of the spreadsheet, although volumes have been written on the how-to of individual programs, a type of social theorization is sorely lacking. This quote was obtained off the Internet and cited to Hugh Legg’s “Ricco Mattessich: Acclaimed Researcher,” VIEWPOINTS (Summer 1988) p. 15.
[3] Mattessich and Galassi credit assistants Tom Schneider and Paul Zitlau with the development of the first actual computerized spreadsheet based on an algebraic model written by Mattessich. It was reported in “The History of Spreadsheet: From Matrix Accounting to Budget Simulation and Computerization”, a paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Accounting Historians in Madrid, August 2000.
[4] Levy, S. (1989) “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge,” in Computers in the Human Context: Information Technology, Productivity, and People. Tom Forester (ed) Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
[5] Bricklin quote from (2002) Computing Encyclopedia. Volume 5: People. Smart Computing Reference Series. p. 30.
[6] Weyhrich, Steven. Sophistication & Simplicity: the Life and Times of the Apple II Computer. Variant Press, 2013. Originally in the Apple II History website at
[7] Interview with Dan Bricklin by Michael Fitzgerald, in RED HERRING, October 15, 2001, p 40.
[8] There is to some extent a poverty of language to describe the functions of the spreadsheet, although volumes have been written on the how-to of individual programs, a type of social theorization is sorely lacking. This quote was obtained off the Internet and cited to Hugh Legg’s “Ricco Mattessich: Acclaimed Researcher,” VIEWPOINTS (Summer 1988) p. 15.
Levy, S. (1989) “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge,” in Computers in the Human Context: Information Technology, Productivity, and People. Tom Forester (ed) Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

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Pennings, A.J. (2022, Dec 7) VisiCalc and the Rise of the PC Spreadsheet. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/digital-monetarism/visicalc-and-the-rise-of-the-pc-spreadsheet/

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and Research Professor at Stony Brook University. He teaches digital economics and sustainable development. Previously, he taught macroeconomics and digital media management at New York University. He also taught in the MBA program at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in South Korea.

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Category: data analytics and meaning, digital monetarism, digital spreadsheets
Tags: Google Sheets > Lotus 1-2-3 > Microsoft's Excel > Richard Mattessich > VisiCalc

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