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 ...

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 ...

Dan Bricklin invented the spreadsheet—but don’t hold that against him You may not know Dan Bricklin, but you are almost certainly familiar with his work. It’s fair to say that the Boston-based ...

PCWorld explores how AI still lacks a transformative “killer app” like VisiCalc was for early personal computers, despite recent advances like Anthropic’s Claude for Small Business. While new AI tools ...

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 ...

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 ...

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the public debut of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet and the personal computer industry’s original killer app. Co-creator Dan Bricklin has a post with some ...

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, ...

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 ...