Tuesday, December 17, 2013

A Brief History of Spreadsheet

The name Spread-sheet is used to represent ‘spread’ which is a paper that has two facing pages (think of centre page in a book or newspaper) and format used to present book-keeping ledgers—with columns for categories of expenditures across the top, invoices listed down the left margin, and the amount of each payment in the cell where its row and column intersect.

VisiCalc:

Developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, VisiCalc is known as first electronic spreadsheet. This software was implemented in Apple II in 1979 and IBM PC in 1981. It has many features that modern day spreadsheet contain, for example: interactive user interface, automatic recalculation, status and formula lines, range copying with relative and absolute references, formula building by selecting referenced cells.

VisiCalc soon became so famous, people started buying PCs just to work on VisiCalc. Experts often attribute Apple II success with VisiCalc. 

Below is the screenshot of VisiCalc:


If you are enthusiastic on how it used to work, you can experience it by yourself by downloading a version of VisiCalc on your PC, it works on DOS. Here is the link to download and further information on this awesome age-old tool.

Lotus 1-2-3:

Late 1982, IBM introduced Lotus 1-2-3 specially for IBM PC. It started outselling VisiCalc soon after release and was in market as leader.

Microsoft Excel:

First developed on Macintosh platform, Excel was released first in 1985 and was quick to take over lion’s share of Lotus spreadsheet market. Since this is what this blog is created upon, we will see more on Excel in coming posts.

Quattro Pro, Gnumeric etc are other somewhat popular spreadsheets available.

Source: wikipedia.org

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