Before Microsoft's Excel came about, a Harvard MBA student and his former MIT classmate built the first spreadsheet software for the Apple II. It was 1979 and Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wanted to ...

VisiCalc was a ‘killer app’ years ahead of its time, and still says much about the way we understand computers Tidying my office the other day, as one does at this time of year, I came upon a shabby, ...

January 2, 1979: Entrepreneurs Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston incorporate their company Software Arts to publish a program called VisiCalc. The first spreadsheet software for the Apple II, VisiCalc ...

I learned, belatedly, that last October 17 was Spreadsheet Day, marking the 35th anniversary of VisiCalc, the Apple II program that started it all. This moved me to republish a long piece I wrote 30 ...

Individual user productivity is to Unified Communications as VisiCalc was to personal computing. VisiCalc, of course, was one the first software programs that enabled individuals to harness a PC to ...

It was the first killer app, the spark for Apple’s early success and a trigger for the broader PC boom that vaulted Microsoft to its central position in business computing. And within a few years, it ...

In 1978, a Harvard Business School student named Dan Bricklin was sitting in a classroom, watching his accounting lecturer filling in rows and columns on the blackboard. Every time the lecturer ...

Essential to the open source argument is the idea that the basic infrastructure of the information age is just that -- infrastructure -- and the public interest demands it be treated as such. This ...