Founders at Work.pdf

84 Founders at Work
whatever we were doing—we needed a copy of it, and it was late at night; there
were no all-night things. Bob had a copier. In the old days, Xerox’s patents
hadn’t run out, and people didn’t have Xerox machines at home. We had a thing
which had a lightbulb in the bottom and used this heat-sensitive paper or something,
and you put one page over another, and you end up with this brown-onbrown
output. And that was the actual contract that we signed. Dan had the
contract in hand, and he jumped on an airplane and flew off to New Orleans,
where Ben Rosen was having his conference (later it became Esther Dyson’s
conference), and that’s where he first showed it off to people.
Ben had seen a prototype, and it was being announced, semi-publicly, at the
conference. So that last-minute getting that done, that was the type of thing we
were doing.
I wrote an accounting system. Not only did I write the editor, I wrote an
accounting system for us, and I did all the bookkeeping. I mean, here I am, a
business school student taught to do accounting by a wonderful professor of
accounting and then taught cost accounting by Jim Cash, who’s now on the
Board of Microsoft, but I’m now trying to figure out doing debits and credits by
hand. I didn’t know what the real world had on that. And I was doing my own
bookkeeping. I wrote a system to do it.
Livingston: Did you have any competitors?
Bricklin: We were nervous that competitors would come out. But there was
just so much optimism in those days. And we were doing this as a stepping
stone to do other things. We didn’t know this was going to be such a big thing.
We figured we’d just keep on figuring out all sorts of cool stuff.
Livingston: Do you remember when you finally thought, “OK, this is a big
deal?”
Bricklin: It felt like a really big deal when I started having people I didn’t know
in the regular part of the world knowing about spreadsheets and taking them
for granted. When the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial about the budget in
Washington and said, “Yellow ledger pads and VisiCalc spreadsheets all over
Washington are trying to figure this out,” that really hit me.
IBM came to us wanting VisiCalc on the IBM PC, and when they ran the
advertisements on TV, they showed VisiCalc (or they showed what they said was
VisiCalc; it was a mockup that they did) with Charlie Chaplin pushing a button.
When Apple ran an ad, they had Dick Cavett—who had never done ads on TV
before—and he would push a button and up would come VisiCalc on the
screen. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing, I’m sure, but I thought,
“Wow! That was really cool! Dick Cavett!”
One thing that really hit home was when I was going back to the airport
from a conference where Ross Perot had spoken—he was the head of EDS. A
few of us from Software Arts shared a limousine with senior EDS people, and
they knew about VisiCalc. This is EDS, which is the big mainframe company.
They said, “Oh yeah, we did some deal, and we used VisiCalc to do all the calculations
for the deal.” Now, here’s EDS, that has infinite computing power