Founders at Work.pdf

82 Founders at Work
Livingston: Space was an issue?
Bricklin: Oh God, the whole system, the operating system, the screen buffer,
the program, and the data that you’re running on, fit in 32K. A screenshot of
VisiCalc doesn’t fit in 32K nowadays. The Apple II only had 48K max. So this
program launched in 48K, and you’re going to put in a help? When Lotus
launched with their help system, it was a separate disk that you put in that had
the whole system in it.
Livingston: Didn’t Lotus design 1-2-3 with the IBM in mind?
Bricklin: It ran in 256K or maybe 128—I don’t remember—but you had to
have an extra disk in the drive if you wanted help, as I recall. Just think about it:
if a help screen has a thousand characters and you’re going to have 10 help
screens, there goes 10K! Where are you going to fit it when you only have 20K
of memory for the whole sheet? How much are you willing to give? So I printed
a reference card up, which my father actually helped me do—my father’s printing
business typeset and printed that whole thing for us. An awful lot of people
learned the product from the reference card.
It had the ability to lock—because, remember, you had a very small screen,
40 characters by 24/25 lines on the Apple II—it allowed you to lock columns or
rows on the screen. They call them panes now, I think, in Excel; you could lock
the panes. We called them titles. You could lock the title area, and, as you
scrolled, they’d synchronize, so that if you scrolled sideways, the stuff stayed in
place.
It had two windows—you could actually split the window and watch two
parts of the screen at once—so you could type numbers in one place and look at
the sum somewhere else. And you could scroll them in unison. You could lock
them in synchronous, so as you scrolled one, the other scrolled, and in one of
them you might have the titles locked. And in fact, you got different column
widths in different ones. Bob put in all sorts of cool stuff. They don’t do that
stuff today.
But it didn’t have commas in numbers, because we had some bugs in that.
We never shipped that, which was a real problem. And all the columns were the
same width. You could change it, but they were all the same width, and that was
bad. If you had a label that was longer than a column and there was a blank cell
next to it, it didn’t automatically go into it. You had to cut it into two pieces.
Those were real killers. Those were things that 1-2-3 had, among others.
When 1-2-3 came out, those were the things people asked. “Does it have
commas in numbers? And dollar signs before the numbers?” I think we had
dollar format, which meant .00. But did it do commas, did it have variable column
widths, and did it have the long labels? I remember Vern Raburn telling
me those were three of the main questions that he was asked, and then people
said, “Fine, I’ll buy it.” So those were features we didn’t have that would have
been nice if we did. We knew we needed those, but there was just a limit to
what we could get done and would actually fit and work in the original product.
Livingston: You publicly announced VisiCalc in June. When did you first ship?