Founders at Work.pdf

Mitchell Kapor 95
second-generation product, that had sufficient differentiation that was immediately
visible when you demoed it, and that was what gave it its market entrée.
Being at the right place at the right time also helped. The business world
was poised to adopt personal computers. They were reasonably priced and they
did something useful, which turned out to be Lotus 1-2-3. So the market just
expanded dramatically, far faster than anything any of us in the company would
have imagined.
Livingston: When you demoed it, were there parts where you knew people
were going to go “wow”?
Kapor: Yes, I think the one-button graphing in particular, and the speed of the
calculation. VisiCalc users loved VisiCalc; they just wanted it to do more. And it
didn’t. And when we showed that this did it right out of the box, they went, “I
get it.” I used to get applause doing demos all the time.
This was all so new then, in a way that was recapitulated in the early days of
Netscape, the first time people saw a web browser, web content; the first time
people looked at Amazon. So we had our version of that in the ’80s.
Livingston: I read you spent 10 months programming it. Did you program it?
Kapor: No, Sachs did. He wrote virtually all of the code of the original version.
We came out with it in January ’83. He started working on that code base probably
in October of ’81, so that would be 14 to 15 months. All written in assembly
language, for speed. This was the fifth time he’d implemented a
spreadsheet, so he was pretty good at it at this point.
Livingston: Wasn’t VisiCalc written in assembly language too? Why was Lotus
faster?
Kapor: Because they were writing for an 8-bit machine, and they didn’t take
advantage of the 16-bit architecture in a whole variety of different respects. We
just had more optimized code. And we had a different recalculation algorithm.
We were the first spreadsheet to do something called “natural order of recalculation.”
If your spreadsheet had forward references in it, VisiCalc would take
multiple passes over the whole thing to calculate stuff, but we did one pass
through the entire formula chain, and as long as there weren’t circular references,
it would calculate properly. So it was much faster for certain cases.
Livingston: Was the code tuned to the IBM machine?
Kapor: It was tuned to the Intel 808X 16-bit architecture. And Sachs was also
very, very good. He was just an artist at high performance with limited resources.
I didn’t know how good he was; I got lucky. I knew he was good, but he was a
genius at this sort of stuff. The two of us together was essentially 1 + 1 = 3,
because I had a vision about the product and very strong ideas about the feature
set and the user interface, and he was generally willing to let me drive
things at that level. He had the responsibility for the technical architecture and
implementation, but I’m actually quite technical, so I was able to talk with him
to fully understand a number of the issues and limitations and modify the
design in a way that was consistent with what we could actually do. So we had a
critical mass of knowledge between the two of us that neither of us had alone.