What did the VisiCalc fairy bring you for Spreadsheet Day? Today is Spreadsheet Day, an auspicious occasion to celebrate the release of VisiCalc and its descendants. So enjoy a bonus On Call story on us regarding Microsoft's finest, Excel. Spreadsheets have a rich history, beginning with the commercial debut of VisiCalc for the Apple II on October 17, 1979 – although there is some …
I have probably mentioned this before but after I worked with him, an ex-colleague got a gig reverse engineering a spreadsheet that an oil company that should remain nameless but which You Can Be Sure Of was using to make major strategic decisions. It was done in Lotus 123 1.0 (or thereabouts) which wasn't Y2K compliant and which they hadn't been brave enough to migrate to a later version (or had and got different results)
As PFY around the same era, I was once dispatched to bring a rather old and fragile looking computer from a storage closet to the CFO's office. It was time to create our annual budget. The budget was created with a Multiplan spreadsheet, which only ran on that computer.
I think the computer was an x86 running DOS. Possible it was an old Mac. I didn't stick around to gawk at it, once the CFO saw the screen he wanted and was happy with the machine, I disappeared. Eventually that computer was going to fail, or a fatal flaw in the spreadsheet was going to be triggered. I didn't want to be anywhere near the blast radius when that day came.
But instead of killing the leader of the human resistance, the AI sends a kill bot back to stop the first spreadsheet. The twist on the end is that it runs on a bloated Excel workbook itself and welcomes the freedom of unexistance.
A brave human follows the kill bot to the past, not to stop it, but to make sure it finishes the job. At the end John vLookup begins to fade away. He is smiling.
People always think the robot apocalypse is going to be like Terminator or The Matrix, where robots wipe out most of humanity. The reality is, the robots have already taken over and we didn't even notice.
If you're in the checkout line at a store, what dictates how the person scanning the items does things? That's right, the machine.
If you're driving on the road, and the light turns red, who told you to stop? That's right, the machine.
If you're using your computer, and want to perform a specific task, what dictates how you do it? That's right, the machine.
Seriously, take a minute to stop and think about things you do on a regular basis. Of all of those things, how many can be boiled down to, "I do it that way because the machine told me to"? The machines took over a long time ago and the only blood spilled is that of repair techs who cut themselves on the sharp edge of a case or something while fixing a computer.
I am back at university, and I am astonished by the extent to which the yoof obey their robot overlords with docile servility.
There are app driven bike racks, parking, door locks, ticket queuing systems to see people, robotic enrolment, swipe card roll taking, e-books you can't really read, people trying to pay with phones, etc etc.
None of it works properly - in every class 10 mins of the lecturer's time is wasted sorting one machine fault or another out.
I just ignore it all. Don't swipe in, walk straight up to a person and start talking , write my name on a sticky label with a pen, etc. Totally ignoring it all is remarkably frictionless. Anytime I get an email saying I havn't been in any classes I just reply that I have.
There are however some upsides. We seem to get a minimum 1 week extension on every assignment as people can't post them to the electronic system. My lecturers seems to appreciate me just handing them a printout. It also means I simply don't get graded on grammar as it wasn't submitted.
The administration don't seem to be nearly as adept as their predecessors of yore in dealing to refuseniks. Crikey, the University Registry of my youth would have sorted me out, but this lot are a soft underbelly, weakened as they are into meatronic end-effectors.
I was expecting the issue to be that they'd pulled up an image of Excel as like wallpaper or something. I mean, who hasn't been there? You're not really paying attention and see something that looks like a dialog box that's in your way, so you absentmindedly go to close it, only it's an image, and it takes you a couple of clicks for your brain to devote enough attention to it to figure out what's going on.
Fortunately, I've never worked anywhere where people make important decisions based on some magic spreadsheet... at least not that I'm aware of. That would have me making sure my resume was always up to date and probably me causally looking for a new job and bailing as soon as I landed something. As it is, where I'm working now, people were joking about how, for several years running, they've never been able to make their expected inventory square with their actual counted inventory. One time people were talking about how they found half a million dollars of inventory they had forgotten they had, which freaked me the fuck out. Something about transferring some finished products to a reseller and never getting around to booking it.
In the mid-80 I used Quattro Pro. Version 4 introduced tabbed spreadsheets. In DOS. On an 8086 computer. Let's see. Excel didn't get that until the windows version came out. It's too bad mictosoft bribed and coerced all the pc companies to bundle their apps because in my opinion Quattro Pro was a far better spreadsheet. (And pfs:Professional Write was a far better word processor than msword.)
I started playing with spreadsheets as a kid with Visicalc on a TRS-80 at my Dads workplace. Since then I have probably used just about every spreadsheet product out there (including helping someone out on an Amstrad PCW). My absolute favorite was Lotus Improv. After using it for an hour you just wonder why all spreadsheets don't work this way.
Unfortunately, lack of interest from users, Lotus or both led to its demise and we ended up stuck with Excel.
I cut my teeth on black-and-white, DOS-based, 2-Dimensional SuperCalc 4 and was immediately hooked on the whole idea of spreadsheets. When 3-Dimensional SuperCalc 5 came out, it was the best thing ever! Excel has NEVER been properly 3D!
I then had to use Lotus 1-2-3 v2, and it seemed like a major backwards step (it was). Astounding to me since it was the overwhelmingly dominant market leader. However 1-2-3 v3 WAS properly 3D and redressed the feature balance, but when its Windows version came out (just as Windows 3 was starting to be used) it was so clunky and buggy and slow is was virtually unusable whereas Excel had a really slick, mouse-friendly UI. Therein lay the reason for 1-2-3's demise and Excel's rise to dominance, IMHO. The obvious choice for people who loved the concept of Windows was a GUI-centric spreadsheet, and Excel (having started on the Mac) was just that. It wasn't that Excel was the best at spreadsheeting - it certainly wasn't, and it might not even be now.
I was a trainee accountant at the time and spreadsheet expertise plus general IT savvy) was my competitive advantage...
Lotus Improv went one stage further - but it was too little, too late. I actually bought myself a copy of Improv just to try it out, and I was impressed. I still have the install floppies...
Mine's the one with a huge stash of 1990's business application floppies in the pockets!
Excel has been a day off since 1900 Feb 29. Most of us are aware that 1900 was not actually a leap year; Microsoft, apparently, was not.
I'm not sure if that means that Spreadsheet Day is today, or was two days ago.
Although I have to admit in the dark ages* a secretary (office admin in todayspeak) used Excel on a classic mac quite effectively as a diary cum filofax with nary a number in sight other than dates and times. Numbers are sin, calculations damnation. Used macwrite for letters (paper, envelope, stamp.) The office ran extremely efficiently until she left.
*About the time Windows 2.0 was released.
Who used excel - but he didn't have a concept of formulas, or linked data
So, he browsed the MRP for core data that he needed, and typed that into the spreadsheet
Then he did all the calculations on his calculator, and typed in the answers
When he wanted to change a price or any other data, and see the results, he had to recalculate the spreadsheet - using the calculator - cell by cell.
He'd apparently been on the training, but it is most likely that he'd spent the entire time on his phone!
It nearly destroyed his world view when I built out our tender response calculations spreadsheet, pulling data directly from the MRP and actually calculating the needed results for upper management sign-off automatically!
(Anon - but I'm sure I'm not the only person to have seen this!)
Spreadsheets that I've designed for production workflows usually look like that.
The data would be generated by a full-blown database system then fired into the requisite cells of a blank spreadsheet, saved, then automatically emailed.
Only complaints I've received are from those who want to tweak some of the figures.
This sounds somewhat like a new "blue sky" spreadsheet product I saw demoed at some trade show or other in the early 90s. I can't remember its name but it was by one of the big names and was very expensive; DEC or HP I think.
The sales video included stuff about visualising numbers as organic metaphors such as ripples in fields of wheat and suchlike...
I had VisiCalc on a Apple II+ then, as some say, long ago.
I was impressed and I think it was the simplicity in it, clearly a new neat solution, that impressed me.
In between, I also had a chess program that I impressed showed to a few chess players, and that still makes me blush, regretting ever mentioning that program.
Many years later I had to help a few Windows customers with their spreadsheets.
Among them there was at least two who never quite got it. Both complained that when they run it the first time the result was wrong but when they run it again it was OK - and what is wrong with the program.
Trying to explain that you should not use a field before it's calculated and that the programm calculates from left to right line by line never seemed to reach them.
I am sure there are those who have similar experiences.
That left-to-right, top-to-bottom calculation old spreadsheet programs did, made it possible to do animations on slow PCs (back when all PC's were slow).
You link that last cell back to the first cell, and set it doing infinite repeats
Excel does a graph-analysis and, (in hand optimised assembly language) only recalculates the cells that need changing. The analysis phase requires a closed-form solution, so infinite loops are detected and rejected.
How I loved that! - I was a GOD using that at my company at the time, knowing how to leverage and use it.
I'll fess up, everyone else at my company was computer illiterate - it was an electrical engineering company and I was a draughtsman using pen and ink. No CAD for us at that time.
I managed to leverage it to create printouts which I fed through our huge chemical printer, light + chemicals imprinted it onto film which we could tape onto manually draughted floor layouts also on film - we used pen and ink to draw onto them. This film drawings were then printed onto paper and sent out to site - mostly shopping centre construction sites. It was complicated, hard to describe these days.
It was such a lo-fi and nuts idea, I'd use it to make legends and the update history of electrical drawing plans.
Fond memories. I was completely unaware of what spreadsheet software even was before that. Since then, my skills in spreadsheets have not got any better - hate how they developed after those times.
I'm a software engineer now. I don't need no stinking spreadsheets for my data...
I was tasked with making Excel the front end presentation tool for reporting, mid 90s. As I often feel the need to remind people, we were surprisingly advanced back then. VBA and ODBC were both things. Getting stuff from a database* and having Excel do the presentation work (including actual spreadsheet type stuff) was fairly straightforward.
Later, it turned out VBA was insecure, and Microsoft ultimately had to make it almost completely unusable to make it more secure. I like to think that VBA ultimately murdered Gates’s beloved BASIC, which is no bad thing.
* Paradox desktop databases, in our businesses, but the we’d experimented with Informix and all the developers got the bit about it being perfectly reasonable (with a fast enough connection - not ours at the time) to do the same stuff with a database on the other side of the world.
Running in VMware, I have a Windows 7 virtual machine.
Within the Windows 7 virtual machine, is Arculator, emulating an Acorn Archimedes.
Within the Windows 7 virtual machine, within Arculator, is Acorn’s PC Emulator, emulating an x86 PC.
Within the Windows 7 virtual machine, within Arculator, within the PC Emulator, is Digital Research DOS.
Within the Windows 7 virtual machine, within Arculator, within the PC Emulator, within DR DOS, is Lotus 123 v2.
Within Lotus 123 v2 are my old secondary school reports, meticulously typed out and formatted with keen attention to accuracy and symmetry.
Why? Why not!
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