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 ...

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 ...

We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...