Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: Did it drive sales for the Apple II along with VisiCalc?
Dan Bricklin 79
Bricklin: Well, for Apple, yeah. Eventually we could track Apple sales by how
many we sold. But the first year we were only selling a thousand units a month.
Livingston: Who were the very first users?
Bricklin: There was Al Sneider, locally, who was at Laventhol & Horwath,
which is an accounting firm, and he started pushing them to use personal computers.
They did a lot of accounting for the gaming business. They actually used
VisiCalc to figure out how to lay out a casino and where to put which slot
machines, I’m told. There were doctors who had bought personal computers
because they thought it would be kind of cool, who used it for, I think, anesthesiology
calculations in open-heart surgery.
We got cards back where people said what they used it with; we asked them
in their registration card. They were people who liked technology and were
enamored with the personal computer, who knew business. But, as I say, only a
thousand units a month. It took a while for people to get what it was, and these
people evangelized it.
Hewlett-Packard got it. One of my classmates from Harvard Business
School worked in the group that was developing a personal computer there,
and they read Ben Rosen’s write-up, and Hewlett-Packard licensed it and did
their own implementation based on our software.
Livingston: What were the biggest conceptual hurdles for you as you were
building the product?
Bricklin: The original vision was of an electronic blackboard or work area. In
fact, initially I also thought of it as a head-up display (like in a fighter plane)
where—using a mouse together with a key pad, like a calculator with a mouse
ball on the bottom or something—you could lay things out and you could use it
real time while looking at people or something. So this electronic blackboard
type of thing, like the typesetting layout software that was being worked on at
the time. The Harris 2200 was one that I was very interested in, which nobody
knows about, but I have the Seybold write-up of it.
I had seen what we now call desktop publishing, because in computerized
typesetting, that’s what they were doing for display ads. Classified ads are automatically
laid out, more or less, but in the display ads, where you’re putting
“Sale!” and all this stuff, that general-purpose layout—that was the hot thing,
developing that two-dimensional, general-purpose layout stuff like PageMaker.
The PageMaker people came out of computerized typesetting—out of Atex,
which is a local company that did computerized typesetting and one of my competitors
when I worked at DEC.
So I had this idea, this general two-dimensional layout, and I had the idea of
calculating and then recalculating, because it’s like word wrap; it does that. So
those ideas came up right away for me. But then how do I really express that?
What exactly are the keystrokes that you do? What exactly is the metaphor?
How do I make it easy to learn? I had struggled with this in the word processing
world, when we invented things for word processing, because when we did