Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year Microsoft Excel, the true successor to the throne of COBOL. Version 1.0 was released on the last day of September 1985, four decades ago. Since the original US English version of Windows 1.0 went to manufacturing at the end of November that year, this means that the default spreadsheet for Microsoft Windows is itself older …
I used version 2 on the Mac and Windows in '87. I developed a timesheet system for a factory. The workers had their own timesheets and at the end of the week, they placed them in a common folder and a Macro (not VB, that hadn't been invented yet) went through and opened each file and pulled out the users time bookings and made a summary per department for management...
We still used 1-2-3 as well. I once worked on a system that pulled data from a VAX and put it into spreadsheets in 1-2-3 for the sales people to enter their forecasts, per product, per customer. There were so many spreadsheets, it was crazy. We’d knocked up a demo in 1-2-3 in a couple of days to show how it could work and said we could program it in C++ in a couple of months. They liked the demo, the demo did 90% of what they wanted (on half a dozen products for 2 customers) and we should just expand that. No matter how hard we tried, they wouldn't listen, but, hey, they were paying the bills...
So we developed the whole thing in 1-2-3. It was a bit sluggish and self-changing macro code made it difficult to follow, but it mostly worked, until it didn't. We single stepped through the macros, everything worked. We let the macro run, it crashed. We stepped, worked, run, crash... In the end, we sent the code and sample spreadsheets to Lotus, their answer was, "WTAF! 1-2-3 was never designed for something like this, go and write it in C++ or something!" :-D
When run, the spreadsheets were taking so much memory, they were corrupting the macros, but when you stepped through the corruption didn't happen, because it was keeping the macro in main memory all the time to step through.
From the customer's perspective,
1. Getting 90% of what I want right now, vs. 100% of what I want who-knows-how-much-later is the way to go.
2. If I can see it, it's real.
Factor #2 is problem with using RAD tools to create demos which are just that, and do not contain actual, or scalable, functionality.
As they found out later when they tried to sue Microsoft, only for Xerox PARC to step I with a quiet "ahem"
I first saw Excel and Word running on a Mac, but I found the Mac way of working to be counter intuitive.
Now it's Libre Office for me! Excel has been all downhill since 4.0 (which had a really nice optimiser)
Slight correction, the add was talking to IBM in 1981, 3 years before the Mac, which copied the Xerox PARC Alto. Their first personal computer was years earlier in 1975/76, half a decade before IBM joined the market, as referred to in the add.
They probably weren't the first personal computer, but they were one of the first. The Kenbak 1 beat it by 2 years, for sure.
Hmmm... Cub computers? Used those around that period (75/76) - don't know if those class as Personal Computers or terminals, but I remember programming them for text to speech. BBC Micro was 1981... ZX Spectrum was 1982... Lots of very early home computers were appearing around then. Remember one with a built in joystick - think that was the Dragon.
Atari home computer was 1979.
All those predates apple (1984).
Yeah, the "holy trinity" of Apple, Tandy, Commodore in 1977ish. The Apple 1 is usually not counted as it wasn't a fully built, cased consumer item, which is where we usually start the history or home or personal computing. It's arbitrary, true, but history often uses arbitrary boundaries for convenience :-)
Big_D said: "personal computer"
Helicat said: "Personal Computers"
In advertising, begin precise is vital, especially when trying to pull the wool over the eyes of purchasers and judges :-)
"personal computer" is generic while "Personal Computer" is a descriptively named item. So, there may well have been personal computers around long before the Personal Computer was invented :-)
On a marginally more serious note, my TRS-80 was a personal computer, as was your Apple ][, Commodore PET, KIM-1, Altair 8800 etc, but IBM defined the architecture of the Personal Computer and hammered that usage and marketing home so hard that now we say the capitalised abbreviation PC all the time and we all *know* we mean the evolved version of the original IBM PC. Even if a Mac is also a "personal computer" :-)
Also Smart, later Smartware and Smartware II. All DOS/text based but with an overarching programming/scripting language and interoperability between the word-processor, spreadsheet, database, graph tool, diary/calendar and comms/terminal tool. Very very powerful for the time.
Odd.
I liked Multiplan but first used Lotus 123 and found it OK. It could add up more accurately than humans and printed output was neat. Next was UniPlex on Unix 5.2 on a 286. Loved it. Spreadsheet had similarities to Multiplan that I found useful. Able to load data into database (Informix under hood I believe) and extract it quickly using embedded SQL in cells. Found an unused Uniplex install decades later on a local council server I was retrieving data from. No-one on staff knew what it was, let alone used it.
However loved Excel on first use, even if it was on a Mac. It followed the BO rule. Bloody Obvious that is. Until 2007 Excel was, IMHO, the one thing M$ did well. Now I cant even get it to sum up my flight log book hours as it insists on converting HH:MM to anything else. Earlier versions just worked. Using WPS now if I must.
As for Improv. Yech. Fed Gov department tried it on release. Soon replaced with excel. Tried a free Windows version a year or two later from a PC magazine disk. Crashed and burned more than a rocket startup.
As for its age, nothing gets younger and being alive beats alternative. I admire those original programmers who got good performance from low resource machines while creating usable interfaces that let so much number wrangling get done.
"it insists on converting HH:MM to anything else."
Agreed! I think going back to the "old" way of doing it whereby at most the spreadsheet is allowed to automatically decide if a cell content is text or numeric and the user has to specify data type and format for everything else might help those who don't really understand what they are doing to be more disciplined when creating a spreadsheet and not get bitten by making assumptions :-) Allowing the spreadsheet to assume data type and formats based on what you entered has probably caused more weirdness that is hard track down than almost anything else in computing.
Yes. Love here.
I had a copy of Lotus 1-2-3, and I used it extensively. So extensively that I, at the time, found out that filling a 360x240 pixel screen (CRT for you whippersanappers out there) of cells would max out My 8086 x 128KB (yes, kilobytes - megabytes weren't even thought of yet) PC and I couldn't fill a cell more.
Then I got a copy of Multiplan and, all of a sudden, I could fill four times more cells with calculations and data.
I never looked back.
Then I got my filthy pirate hands on a copy of Boeing Calc.
Oh my God, that was something.
Excel today ? It's only interesting for the pretty charts that manglement needs to keep thinking it's doing a good job.
Same here, started with Supercalc (was there a version 3? memory is hazy for back then) on Apricot "PCs" with dual 3.5" floppys that you booted the machine from, then 1-2-3 which I loved.
The M$ started giving away word and excel with every laptop sold (remember those piles of floppy disks?) and that was it for Lotus 1-2-3
Multiplan for Mac was one of the fist apps available for the original 128 kB Mac. I had a copy. At one point I had 100% of the available software for Macs, a.k.a. a grand total of 23. (Yes, I also had Chart.) Microsoft Mac products were 'copy protected'. You could get a second, backup, floppy for an additional $10. Or you could buy CopyIIMac https://macintoshrepository.org/software_search.php?autid=137&p=1 and make your own copy. Guess which way I went. (When Lotus finally got around to 'supporting' Macs by providing Jazz, which was NOT 1-2-3, they used an 'uncopyable' floppy which used 405 kB instead of the standard 400 kB. CopyIIMac worked on Jazz, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Jazz)
Multiplan was... not very good. It was, however, the first and only spreadsheet available for Macs at the time. And those who had both Multiplan and Chart got a special upgrade price for Excel when it became available in 1985. Excel was a LOT better. I think that Excel was also no copy protected; by 1985 the first hard drives were becoming available for Macs, and MS figured that anyone who was using Excel would probably be using a hard drive. I upgraded my Mac 128 to first Fat Mac 512 and then to Mac Plus: 1 MB RAM and a SCSI port. I got a 40 MB SCSI drive.$600. Moe space than I would ever need. Incredibly fast. I cranked the Mac to 4 MB RAM and had a better machine than the supermini I used at work (a Harris H800.) and almost as good as the corporate mainframe, an IBM big iron of some type. thee were half-a-dozen users on the Harris and dozens on the Big Blue Box, and I had all that glorious power all to myself at home. Excel, MacDraw, and MacProject allowed me to do stuff faster than the work machines. Excel atte Jazz's lunch, kicked sand in its face, and stomped on it. Excel's lack of copy protection meant that it could be used on hard drives without gymnastics. Basically, after this I never again bought anything from Lotus for personal or business use, but have bought a lot of MS products.
(I got MacProject and MacDraw for free, courtesy of one Apple marketing gimick or other. My Mac and Imagewriter, no capital w, it was an original Imagewiter and not a ImageWriter II or later, plus Excel and Word allowed me to plan out several major projects, complete with documentation, well under time and under budget. There was drawing software and report-writing software and spreadsheet software available for the Harris and/or the Big Blue Box, but they were EXPENSIVE; the drawing software on the Harris required a $15,000 21" colour terminal with a trackball. You don't want to know what Big Blue waned for project management software. And if you used the drawing software on the Harris you had to kick everyone else off., the Harris then became a half-million-dollar personal computer, which was slower and more annoying than a Mac Plus.)
I'm not sure how it came about but in around 1988 the small software house/dealer I was working for were asked if we could help someone who'd just installed Excel and was having a few problems. On the basis of having had brief exposure to SuperCalc and Lotus Symphony (the DOS version) I was despatched to see what I could do.
The customer seemed happy enough - he paid the bill and gave me a very nice lunch in the local pub!
I remember using EMultiplan - or Enhanced Multiplan - under Unisys' CTOS in the early- and mid-90s which I believe was the forerunner of Excel. If I remember correctly, converting existing EMultiplan spreadsheets to Excel was fairly easy when I did eventually start using Excel in 1995 as the formulae format was similar-ish, but the two systems were separate, so it was a manual process.
Not sure if Multiplan/EMultiplan became Excel or if it simply donated the general principles.
Interesting.
Lotus 1-2-3 was my first spreadsheet and it made things so much easier for our newly-formed company. Alongside dBase III I felt we were at the cutting edge.... I wrote a very strong case to get Improv, won and bought a copy to test things out. For some reason it just didn't gel for me or my colleagues/assistants. It was quietly abandoned with no fanfare.
On the other hand, adopted Excel with ease, as did the whole company. In a very short time it was the only spreadsheet; even idiots picked up the form. Admittedly, Sales thought you could write a whole letter into a single cell...... but they always were a special case.
I've been on several training courses for Excel. After more than 30 years, and even at the 'basic' level, I've never failed to learn something new. That's not just a reflection on my ability to learn new things.
"...even idiots picked up the form."
Not all idiots.
Spreadsheets have always been a mystery to me, I just can't figure them out.
Being dyscalculic might have something to do with my difficulties but for the life of me I could never see any use for Excel or any other of that ilk.
> Before the PC
I had a spreadsheet on my Commodore 64, but I can't for the life of me remember what it called itself. I remember loading it from cassette tape every month to check my payslip, which was calculated with bizarre additions and deductions. I've probably still got the tape somewhere...
And then of course, the Z88 with its kind of mash-up of spreadsheet and word processor which morphed (I believe) in to Pipedream, which my mother used for a while on her A3010. I ended up with Fireworkz on my RiscPC.
The thing is that Excel has a very shallow (initial) learning curve. Anyone who remembers doing maths in a squared-paper book at primary school gets the general idea and once you've made a start you think you've cracked it. I have previously recounted my first ever "support" job for Excel - well, any spreadsheet actually (not sure what version, but it was on WfW3.11). A lady in the office who had recently returned from a three day training course was in all sorts of pickle due to hard-coded values in a spreadsheet and I was asked to look at it as the person in the company most likely to have a clue - bearing in mind I was in that place mainly to wield a signal generator, oscilloscope and soldering iron! At that point I knew about spreadsheets, and I had read about them in magazines and books, but I'd never actually used one in anger.
Sorted her in about 15 minutes...
M.
The / key to open menus in Lotus 1-2-3 still works in the latest version of Excel. Something else that hasn't changed since Excel 4 (the earliest version I've used) is its weird handling of copy and paste. Sometimes I'll want to paste something multiple times but Excel won't let you. And woe betide you if you try to open two files with the same name.
paste something multiple times but Excel won't let you
Apologies if you already know this, but assuming the thing you are pasting is going in to adjacent cells, drag-select them first and then paste. Just be careful because it auto-updates formulae and doesn't always get it right, so you want to make sure the thing you are pasting has $a$1 in the places where you don't want "A1" turning into "A2" etc.
If the cell you are pasting from is also the first in this adjacent group, you don't even have to do the copy-paste thing, just select the cell and then drag the select handle to cover the range of cells you want to populate.
And the number of times I've had to sort people out who know about these tricks, but don't understand how they work "under the hood" as it were, and end up with odd errors in their calculations...
M.
The / key to open menus predates 1-2-3, I was using it on CalcStar on CP/M 2.2.
I loved CalcStar. CalcStar felt solid, reliable. 1-2-3 felt capable, powerful. Excel. ClarisWorks felt cheerful, powerful.
Actually, I miss ClarisWorks. I'm sure there's a market for a sawn off office suite with decent file import/export capabilities even now.
Distributed as part of the free software bundle with the Osborne 1. Alleged to be better than VisiCalc - I wouldn't know, as I've never used a spreadsheet for anything demanding*.
Also a spreadsheet that ran on DEC RT-11 (or possibly TSX). I can't remember its name, but the way it thrashed the disk is unforgettable.
* Many years ago, a customer asked me to build an application in Lotus 123. I couldn't get anywhere with it, probably because of lack of skills. I advised them to let me code it in DBL, a version of DEC DIBOL for the PC, as that was the language I knew best. In retrospect, this may not have been good advice.
To my astonishment, it seems that the DBL language survived until at least December 2014, when "Version 10.3 added support for creating programs that can run on Android and iOS devices".
A set of SuperCalc spreadsheets and macros found the errors in the spreadsheets that had already been presented to the board of directors. Which we kept quiet to protect our relationship with head office.
Kids today don't know it, but one of the magic features of PC spreadsheets was that they had fewer errors than their pencil-on-paper predecessors.
> Also a spreadsheet that ran on DEC RT-11 (or possibly TSX).
I am somehow very pleased that a version of Dibol still exists.
It's long gone now but there was a PC version of TSX, called TSX-32. One of the earlier 32-bit 80386 OSes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170730034612/http://www.sandh.com/tsxdist.htm
> a mockup of the 1-2-3 screen?
There was a PC DOS game in the late 1980s called **Locust 123** which _looked_ like 1-2-3 r2 but in fact was a game where you had to do simple arithmetic on numbers to progress. So you could sit there and play an educational game, I guess exercising and improving your mental arithmetic, while it looked like you were crunching numbers. :-)
Seems forgotten now; can't find a hint of it on Google.
Rock on! For the longest time, I was using my old DOS/Windows menuing system, implemented via the DOS menu program "DougMenu", on my Linux box.
DougMenu ran in DOSBox, and pumped commands into the Y: drive, which was aliased (NET USE?) somehow to a Linux file, which was actually a named pipe, which in turn was read by a Linux shell instance which carried out those commands.
It all worked, but was a bit clunky. I eventually migrated my DougMenu menus to pdmenu, which runs natively on Linux.
I've been retired from paid work for a long time, but create pro bono Excel statistical spreadsheets for a niche area within one of the hard sciences. Since these spreadsheets are downloadable from the internet, they can't include macros or VBA. Everything must be accomplished using cell formulae. As my faculties diminish, I've found that prototyping with Apple's Numbers is much more straightforward (and visually appealing).
There are a few challenges, such as not being able to lock individual cells in Numbers - I've found a workaround by overlaying a locked transparent text box. Additionally, multiple tables can be placed on the same sheet and individually locked. Another issue is that conditional formatting colours can vary, and sequences of rules don't have a "stop" feature. Despite these quirks, using Numbers as a development platform has proved much quicker. I can check the spreadsheets on an iPad or iPhone and then export them as xlsx files, followed by simple testing with Excel. Plus, I mostly avoid dealing with the ribbon interface, which I (still) dislike.
Would be interesting to have an essay how much and little has changed in excel since the beginning.
The old row column notation R number, C number is gone i think, its all letters and numbers for columns and rows. However you still are stuck with very basic input validation just like in the beginning, and the same is true for formatting.
good idea for historical analysis to show the Pareto principal in software. Earliest I go get back to if I can wake up a 486 or early pentium is Excel 3. I suggest a test of abnitio usabbility where a computer illiterate has to complete a simple task on post 2007 and earliest Excel.
Lotus 123 was far,far better than Excel.
The only reason people moved to Excel is because IBM bought Lotus for Lotus Notes and stopped developing 123
Eventually Excel was the only option but still isn’t a full 3D spreadsheet like 123 was.
Lotus Improv was brilliant - until you added one more dimension and found 4Mb RAM wasn’t enough.
I've probably told this story before, but back in 1982 I had a job working at an electrical retailer on Saturdays. I was, of course, the only one there who knew anything about computers which were the hottest thing to buy that Christmas.
Every parent wanted a Spectrum -- or at least that's what their kids told them they wanted. Only thing was there weren't enough of them around. There were, though, lots of Oric-1's. We had crates of them and just before Christmas sold a tonne of them.
Then came the day after Boxing Day... and there was literally a queue outside waiting to return them. I had the job of testing them to see if they were faulty, and the first one was. As was the second. And the third... and so on. Every single one we sold was faulty. After testing about ten of them and all of them failing, my boss told me not to bother and just to give people their money back.
Happy Christmas kids!
In my first job at a publisher of computer magazines in 1987, I ended up slaving over a hot Lotus 1-2-3 to process the monthly management accounts. Since the Qubie IBM clone they lent me at work had only a 20MB hard disk, I had to keep each month's accounts on 5.25in floppies otherwise the squeaky hard disk would have been full after a few months. The macros I wrote to produce the month-on-month, year-on-year and YTD reports (and print them out with graphs and charts) also prompted me to remove and replace one floppy after another throughout the calculation process.
I remain fond of that version of 1-2-3 on DOS, whichever it was. We even published a monthly magazine for Lotus users, which also covered a lot of stuff about Symphony, its corporate integrated package that everyone seems to forget about.
My view is that Lotus wasted too much time buggering around trying to make its so-called "3D" version of 1-2-3 run in under 1MB of RAM under DOS – when it finally launched, it ran like a slug on my PC at work - when it ought to have paid attention to what MS was up to and thrown itself into the Windows dev programme much earlier.
I feel a column coming on. [obligatory sexual double-entendre intended]
Wotcher Ali!
> thrown itself into the Windows dev programme much earlier.
The thing is, Lotus trusted MS and wasted its time building an OS/2 version...
https://winworldpc.com/product/lotus-1-2-3/1x-os-2
It was called 1-2-3/G and for its time it was sophisticated. Lotus was long on top of GUI programming and on classic MacOS it had Jazz, a spreadsheet-cum-presentation program.
https://winworldpc.com/product/lotus-jazz/1x
It also had Symphony on DOS, an early integrated suite. Bit weird but it worked.
There was also Agenda, an early PIM organiser so of thing, Magellan a global search tool, and Grandview, a pretty good outliner which is now DOS freeware.
https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/
"... trusted MS"
As did IBM with OS/2? But trust MS? Bloody long spoon I should have thought (and here applied both ways.)
Not that there is any evidence that the lessons of history have been learnt.
When? "...is blowin' in the wind."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan
Multiplan appeared on the first 16bit home computer, the Texas Instrument TI-99/4a in cartridge form. It ran under CP/M, Apple II, Microbee, Classic Mac OS, MS-DOS, Xenix, Commodore 64, CTOS, TI-99/4A, TRS-80, UNIX, Thomson, in fact a total of 100 platforms.
It was developed using a Microsoft proprietary p-code C compiler ( Discussed here:- http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htm ) as part of a portability strategy that facilitated ports to systems
Lets not forget SuperCalc and Visicalc either.
I was on the inaugural Business & Information Technology degree at my University in 1989 and we had an entire module on using SuperCalc. It was just a room full of 18 year olds with blown minds.
Even now 35 years later my wife still jokes about me making a spreadsheet for absolutely everything and anything
The funniest thing was that we did this course pre-Windows, but by the time we finished and hit the jobs market, we were all suddenly as out-of-date as all the mainframe/VAX dinosaurs they wanted us to replace, and we just had to pretend that we knew what Windows for Workgroups was
I think Excel 3 or 4 was the first version I used
If a spreadsheet is that useful, and practically a guaranteed sale; why doesn't anyone else want to attempt to compete on commercial product anymore? Apart from isolated examples in the open source community, or maybe "oddities" like SPSS with slightly more focussed applications than a general purpose spreadsheet.
Learning "how to excel" is an ingrained skillset, but so was 1-2-3.
We have good competition for graphics, video, audio and music editors. $DEITY knows Adobe made it very easy for other graphics software to exist with their policies and licensing policies.
"... and still runs the world"
Given the state of the place I can easily believe that! Although the decrepit 40+ yo clowns dodderers who think they are running the show are likely as culpable as MS's geriatric software.
Many years ago I think I read that MS actually acquired a mac spreadsheet application which become excel for the mac but I cannot find any record on the interwebs. I would normally just accept I just imagined it but likewise I don't think I could find that the MS C compiler v3 was actually the Lattice C compiler (which at the time was documented in the Wendin Operating System Toolkit (OST) along with a lot of other interesting tidbits. :)
Unlike money which the "love of" is the root of all evil, spreadsheets require no such intermediary being IT's version of evil incarnate in the incompetent hands of the ignorant and the delinquent wreaking financial havoc for the last four decades.
I don't have any problem with grid (tabular) formats for interactive input and output but rather with the opaque model(s) between the two. Rows and columns are like programming in machine code or assembler.
I had forgotten Windows 2 runtime versions. I had one with the Whitewater Group's Actor language Windows software development application. Actor quite nice idea but Windows 2 nasty unpleasant rubbish (MS and I parted rags at that point. :)
...Excel having Lotus 123 shortcuts in Windows 3.11. THE ENTIRE LIST OF SHORTCUTS. You would press backslash ( \ right?) and the entire Lotus 123 list of actions would show up, so you could quickly do whatever you wanted in Lotus in a expedite manner in Excel.
These days, you have to use Excel inside Teams because your company never bought a decent license of Office, and pressing Ctrl+1 won't format the type of cell you are in, Teams will vomit some non-descript advertising page.
I hate when Microsoft does that.
First spreadsheet was Supercalc (running under cpm-86 on a Sirius). Quite dangerous the way that data, calculations and reports are all in the same place. All those formulas, so easy to make a mistake...
Never really liked Lotus once I'd got my hands on VP- Planner from Paperback Software. Data collection in spreadsheet, storage in dBase. All under macro control
In the 1990s, Excel 5 reinvented analytics with pivot tables and msquery connected to the corporate ERP and data warehouse.
Does anyone remember Ability+?
I used it on DOS. It was a single application, with built in, and fully integrated word processor, spreadsheet, and database! You could write a document, reference sheets in your spreadsheets, tables/quries in your database etc. and it would pull them into the document. If you updated anything, all the changes were automatically syncd. Kind of like Crystal Reports, but not... you know... shit.
It was a superb piece of software. Well worth an article.
Not by choice, but my employer wanted an Excel-based reporting tool that would query a back-end Informix database. The JavaScript-based alternative/replacement seems somewhat nicer, with none of the security blockers that make VBA impossible to run in some situations. I never thought I'd write that about JavaScript*. Modern Excel isn't too awful, and if, like me, you're not a power user, AI/LLMs can make surprisingly good coaches when wandering into the unfamiliar.
* I've never read a bit of JavaScript that didn't look hideous to me, but OfficeScript and its Google equivalent might convert me.
Being new in the IT world in 2007 (took a while to get an IT job for reasons) we obviously used Office and Windows XP. Kept seeing the odd job where knowing Lotus Notes etc was required. Being new I thought it was something I might have to learn. Thankfully I never wasted my time on it. And realised, as I became less green, these were companies stuck on old tech.
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