Founders at Work.pdf

Dan Bricklin 81
and how wide are the columns and all this stuff? Is it an integer, is it a floating
point number? How do you specify all that? In computerdom in those days,
that was the most yicky stuff of any computer language—the format statement
in Fortran, and COBOL’s pictures and all that. It was just such a mess. How do
you get the output specification of how it looks?
I ended up with WYSIWYG, like people had done in typesetting. How do
you marry that with calculating? There I came up with use of the grid as a way
to be able to name things. The big problem for me was, how do you name
things? How do you name the value? In the old days, it’s like, variable name
equals expression, right? That’s how computers work. Well, this was, “What’s
the variable name going to be?”
Today it seems so natural: you use A1. Well, first of all, it was A1, not 1
comma 1. It is too many keystrokes, it’s not normal for people, and there’s a
whole lot of problems with it. By going to the map coordinate type of thing—
A1, G7, or something like that—that was something I knew regular people
would understand. But it also parsed well: anything that starts with a letter was
obviously a variable name, because numbers always start with a number, or a
plus and a minus or something. So it made it really easy to make it obvious what
you were typing in. So, if you said 1 + A1, I knew exactly what it was. But, if I
said 1 + 1,1?
So coming up with that idea, coming up with the fact that you’d be editing
the output as the input—you’d basically be inputting into the output; what you
see is what you get—with a separate location that showed the contents and all
the attributes of it at the top, with the menu tree being shown at the top. We
had very little memory space to give you in the way of help, but if you hit /, it
listed all the letters you could type. If you typed a letter, it would give you the
name of the command that you were doing and any options. So basically, it was
always prompting you with what you could do next, once you learned to do the
/ key. And, of course, we could use /, because / is an infix operator, not a prefix
operator, so you always knew that if something started with a /, it had to be a
command. But, if it started with a +, it’s going to be a number. So it was one of
the few characters around that was good for that. And it was not shifted (I hate
holding control keys down), and computers had used / as commands before, so
it was a natural thing to use, for me.
So working out those problems was the thing. But then, after that, everything
else was just, “What are the required features?” Adding replication, the
ability to copy a cell with absolute and relative, that was sort of a natural thing
for me to come up with, and it was not uncommon in other financial forecasting
systems that existed—the time-sharing systems that were not as interactive. So
that just all flowed. And it was just, “What can we throw out to make this thing
useful and to fit in memory?”
Livingston: What kind of interesting features did it launch with? Any that you
wish you had included?
Bricklin: Well, it would have been nice to have a better help system, but there
was no space to store that.