I was in the middle of responding to an email and I used Visicalc as an example to make a point (remember Visicalc?). I couldn't remember how to spell Bob Frankston's last name (I've been friends with Dan Bricklin, the co-investor of Visicalc since I lived in Boston - but I've never met or talked to Bob) so I did a quick Google search on Visicalc.
I hit the jackpot. Dan has a copy of Visicalc that you can run on a PC. I downloaded it and three minutes later I was staring at the Visicalc screen from my childhood (the first time I ran Visicalc was when I was 13). The MS-DOS version is 27,520 BYTES. That's 27k. Not 27MB. 27k. Smaller than most GIFs and JPEGs.
I poked around on Dan and Bob's sites. Dan has a bunch of great stuff on his site (hey Dan - your hair isn't gray). Bob has some long essays on it on his site.
Amy (my wife - who still pines away for the days of Lotus Agenda) just walked in and - after seeing Visicalc up on my screen - said "What was wrong with DOS anyway - wasn't it good enough - at least I could find all of my files."
Dan / Bob (who I still don't know, but feel a special character-based and forward slash bond to) - thanks for the memory. / S Q Y.
Posted in: EntrepreneurshipCOMMENTS (2)
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon) wrote a wonderful book called "In the beginning ... was the command line" that addresses Amy's question. At bottom the answer is that graphical user interfaces are just part of the inexorable Disneyfication of everything. People expect everything they do to be safe, pretty, and entertaining.
Where did I read it the other day... a woman was in one of the national parks and was warned to keep her young child away from a nearby bull elk; she angrily responded "if they were dangerous, the park service wouldn't let them run around loose in the park!"
As Brad's unpaid, unsung, and perhaps unwanted, proofreader, I'm going to point out that while Dan Bricklin could be considered "the co-investor of Visicalc", but maybe Brad meant "co-inventor of VisiCalc" - or then again, given that Brad is an investor, maybe he meant what he typed. And those interword caps are important in the brand name world!
Having started my information technology career at Software Arts, Inc. by replacing Dan as product manager for VisiCalc, I can spell both "Bricklin" and "Frankston" and consider it a real privilege to have worked for several years with Dan and Bob. One thing I remember fondly is those heated Dan and Bob discussions, which would be punctuated with "But, Dan!", "But Bob!"
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