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Article: A visionary strikes again
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- November 27, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1997 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Dan Bricklin has been seeing things again, and the result is a new
program that could change our view of electronic documents.
Bricklin was the leader of a team that created a largely forgotten
piece of software called Visicalc in 1979. Designed for the old
Apple II computer, Visicalc was the first spreadsheet program, and if
you came late to the high-tech party, it's hard to appreciate just
what a breakthrough it was.
Bricklin recently reminded me what a pre-Visicalc spreadsheet
looked like. "It was a piece of paper with rows and columns on it,"
he recalled, "and you would sit with a pencil and eraser and fill
them in." Need to add up a row of numbers on the spreadsheet and