History of the Spreadsheet
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ScribdTranslationsHistory of the Spreadsheet
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ScribdTranslationsHISTORY OF THE SPREADSHEET
History of Electronic Spreadsheets There is a lot of information about information
systems and some people confirm that the first electronic spreadsheet, called
Visicalc, was created in 1978 by Daniel Briclin, who was a student at Harvard
Business School. It is also worth mentioning that he was the one who invented the
first Electronic Spreadsheets.
Bricklin was supposedly preparing a spreadsheet for a HBS (case study) and for the
creation of this he had two alternatives:
1. Do it by hand or
2. Using a time-sharing terminal that used a Mainframe.
Bricklin wanted to make a program where users would be able to view a graph paper
just like accountants did by hand. His vision was (an electronic whiteboard and
electronic chalk in a classroom)
By the summer of 1978, Bricklin had programmed his first executable version of his
concept. The program allowed the user to insert matrices of 5 columns and 20 rows.
The first version was not user-friendly and because of this Bricklin hired Bob
Frankston to expand the program's usability.
Frankston expanded the program to the point that he reduced its requirements,
making it more powerful and practical to be used on a Microcomputer.
During the summer of 1978, Daniel Flystra joined Bricklin and Frankston. Flystra was
a marketer and suggested that the product might be in high demand if it could run on
an Apple Macintosh computer. The three of them formed a company known as
Software Arts Corporation, which was founded in January 1979 and was headed by
Bricklin. In April of that same year, the company began distributing Visicalc, whose
name was taken from an abbreviation made of the English words “Visible Calculator”.
Visicalc became a phenomenon in the 1980s and encouraged many business
owners to buy Personal Computers (PC). Over 1 million copies were sold during
Visicalc's entire production run. What came after Visicalc?
The spreadsheet market was growing rapidly, at the beginning of the 80s Visicalc
was losing popularity among users of the IBM – PC that used Intel microprocessors.
Mitch Kapor invented LOTUS, a fast Electronic Spreadsheet, and it soon became the
standard for new industries. Lotus not only made the process shorter and easier, but
had an A1 reference system (the opposite of Visicalc's R1C1 system). But he also
added graphics to position Spreadsheets on the path to becoming the best package
for visual presentation of data.
Lotus was the first Spreadsheet to introduce cells, ranges, and macros. Kapor
earned a million dollars from the sale of several of his programs to the company
Visicorp. Part of that money was used to start the Lotus Development Corp. Kapor
later offered to sell his Lotus 1-2 program to Visicorp, but Visicorp executives thought
the program was too limited in terms of functionality.
Today Lotus 1-2-3 remains the best-selling application in the world. In 1985 Lotus
purchased Software Arts and discontinued Visicalc. A spokesman said Lotus and
Symphony were better products than Visicalc, so there would be no need to continue
producing it.
The other big hit was EXCEL originally written for the 512k Apple Macintosh in 1985.
Excel was the first spreadsheet to use a graphical interface with a scrolling menu on
the page and a mouse pointer. It automatically became the easiest spreadsheet to
use, since it did not have the old PC-DOS interface (the IBM operating system that
many people had at the time).
The Apple Macintosh was the only computer platform that could run Excel. Excel
never came out with a DOS version. When Microsoft released Windows 2.0 for PCs
in 1987, Excel was one of the first products made for it, and there are still people out
there who are still using Excel 2.1 which was written to run under Windows version 2.
When Microsoft released Windows 3.0 for PCs in 1989, Excel was released with its
new version for Windows 3 and was the only Spreadsheet for Windows, and received
no competition until the summer of 1992.
WHAT IS A SPREADSHEET? An Electronic Spreadsheet is a program that
organizes information into rows (numbers) and columns (letters), where the
intersection of these is known as a Cell (letter, number). The data can be processed
through formulas to obtain a total or result.
To execute these formulas, Spreadsheets obtain information from several cells
specified by the user, which represent information in different formats. Spreadsheets,
on the other hand, are not simple cells for entering numbers to perform different
operations: they are tools that allow you to process these numbers and make graphs
or export them to other documents.
Currently the world leader in Spreadsheets is EXCEL, as it has always been the first
to appear with a new, much improved version. However, with Lotus Smart Suite 97,
Lotus has given its program a big push and has presented a completely renewed
application, very powerful and easy to use. The integration of all the elements that
make up the suite, the possibility of sharing information from a document with the
different applications in the package, the use of everything that 32-bit technology
offers and its complete interpenetration with the Internet are the main characteristics
that define these packages. With them alone it would be possible to perform a
multitude of tasks with the Computer.
CALCULATION HELLO:
Definition: An application program typically used for budgeting, forecasting, and
other financial tasks. In a spreadsheet program, necessary data and formulas are
entered into tabular forms (spreadsheets or worksheets) and used to analyze,
control, plan, or evaluate the impact of actual or proposed changes on an economic
strategy.
Spreadsheet programs use rows, columns, and cells. Each cell can contain text,
numeric data, or a formula that uses existing values in other cells to perform a
particular calculation. To make calculations easier, these programs include built-in
functions that perform standard operations. Depending on the program, a single
spreadsheet can contain thousands or millions of cells.
Some spreadsheet programs also allow you to link one spreadsheet to another that
contains related information and can automatically update the data in the linked
sheets. Spreadsheet programs may also include macro utilities; some can be used to
create and sort databases.