History of Microsoft Spreadsheet

The first spreadsheet on a personal computer was called VisiCalc (short for visible calculator) and was created by Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1978.

Bricklin, student at Harvard Business School, had to perform some analytical tasks as part of his case study. He had two options to do it, either do it by hand or use an awkward mainframe program.  He envisioned “an electronic blackboard and electronic chalk in a classroom”.

He had managed to create the first working prototype model of his concept, which named VisiCalc. It is a program for Apple II computer. He recruited Frankston to help him write the code.

VisiCalc was a huge success. More than 700,000 copies of the program were sold. It was almost single handedly responsible for the success of the Apple II personal computer. By early 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet. Lotus had bought and then discontinued VisiCalc. Borland’s Quattro Pro was another well-known product at that time.

In 1982, Microsoft developed its first electronic spreadsheet program called MultiPlan. In 1985, Microsoft Corporation came up with Excel for the Macintosh computer. This product was remarkable for its use pull down-menus and a point and click device called a mouse. Other spreadsheets use a command line interface that required knowledge of cryptic DOS command.

When Microsoft named its spreadsheet software “Excel,” it apparently did not now that Manufacturers Hanover Trust already had an automated banking program called Excel. As part of the settlement for trademark infringement, Microsoft agreed to refer always to its product as Microsoft Excel.

In the year 1993, with the release of version 5 Excel replaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the industry standard for spreadsheets.
History of Microsoft Spreadsheet

History of computer software

Hardware is physical and may be seen and touched whereas software is intangible and is an intellectual undertaking by a team of programmers. The initial computers did not have a stored program, or what became known later as software.

The earliest high level programming language was Plankalkul developed by Konrad Zuse in 1946.

John von Neumann described the concept of storing a program and data in 1945 during the construction of ENIAC. However, the first computer to function with a stored program was EDSAC at Cambridge University, England in 1949.

The ENIAC was at first controlled by wiring as if it were gigantic plugboard, but later Nick Metropolis and Dick Clippenger converted it to a machine that was programmed from ballistic tables, which were huge racks of dials which decimals digit of the program could be set via the knobs of the decimals switches.

Grace M. was an early pioneer in the development of initial programming languages. Her initial work started on the Mark 1 at Harvard University in 1944.

Software technology during this period was very primitive. The first programs were written out in machine code, i.e. programmers directly wrote on the numbers that correspond to the instructions they wanted to store in memory.

In the mid 1960s, lines of code or LOC was one of the first known measures of software seize, which referred to the number of computer instructions or source statements comprising a computer program and is usually expressed as thousand of lines of codes.

Things began to change in the 1970s, as lower cost personal computers were introduced and software began to be sold as a product.

In 1998, a group of are software users decided to create a new term to describe free software. They felt a new term was needed so users wouldn’t confuse ‘freedom’ with ‘no cost’. They coined the term ‘open source’ and started the Open Source Initiative to promote its use.
History of computer software