Founders at Work.pdf

76 Founders at Work
I took this general layout idea of the word processing and computerized
typesetting world, together with the calculating world of APL and Basic and
stuff, to the needs of business, where you need to be able to ad hoc throw anything
together and make changes. That’s where the idea for the spreadsheet
came from. Then through business school, I met this publisher, Dan Fylstra, of
Personal Software, and his partner, Peter Jennings. Dan was a second-year
Harvard MBA student when I first met him.
When I started programming, he had graduated and was running this business
selling software on cassettes out of his apartment in Allston, Mass. He was
looking for new stuff, like a checkbook program. I actually prototyped VisiCalc
on one of his machines over one of the vacation weekends. I went to his place
and wrote a prototype in Basic. Then we started discussing that they would
publish it. As MBAs (both he and his partner were MBAs), they understood the
value of this thing. They already had a need listed in their list of things they
wanted of financial stuff. And they were looking at other financial forecasting
tools, but this also would do checkbooks and other stuff. So they knew they
could sell it as that; they knew that they would use it. And we made a deal to
produce it.
I had already prototyped it and said what it would do, but I didn’t have time
to program it since I was in school. So, since Bob was out of school, he would
program it.
Livingston: You did it over one weekend? When was that?
Bricklin: The fall of ’78.
Livingston: You just wanted to see if it would work?
Bricklin: No, I had been thinking of the idea; I had daydreamed about it. I had
actually done a prototype on Harvard’s computer system that was available to us
as students. As part of the prototyping, I came up with what we have today: the
A-B-C 1-2-3 type of thing, the columns and rows ways of indicating things;
the idea of having a formula on what we call the contents line that tells you what
you’re pointing to; moving around where you could move the highlight around
from cell to cell—that whole thing. The idea and some of the prototyping had
been done. The actual trying it on a personal computer was written in Basic to
see what it would feel like. And then we actually programmed it in assembly
language starting the winter of ’78/’79.
Livingston: When you first wrote the prototype that you did in Basic, what
surprised you most?
Bricklin: I had originally wanted the thing to use a mouse. There was no mouse
on the Apple II at the time, so I was using the game paddle and turning it. But
the way I was doing it with the game paddles, the cursor was just too unstable.
So I switched to the arrow keys, which were much more discrete.
I learned some computer things. I had it make a sound every time it recalculated
a cell, but it turned out that the making of the sound on the Apple used
up three-quarters of the CPU time, because it did it with a timing loop.
I learned little things like that. But I saw that it was a useful thing and that it