From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2003 - 02:16:24 MDT
On Thursday 11 September 2003 06:48, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, Chuck Kuecker wrote:
> > Anyway, which came first - Excel or Lotus 123? Seems to me Lotus was out
> > first, and Microsoft stole their lunch...
>
> Actually, neither. As I recall, I was working at Yourdon, Inc. in
> the early 1980's when an individual, who if I recall correctly was
> named Mark Pearson, developed the first spreadsheet application I
> ever saw. [I don't recall the name of the program.] Of course it
> was rather cumbersome since windows did not exist so one was running
> it on standard 23x80 terminals. I think subsequently VisiCalc became
> the first well known spreadsheet application. Then came Lotus 123
> followed by Excel. Can't google come up with something on the
> "history of spreedsheets"?
>
Spreadsheets were on of the first places I missed fame. In 1981 I was working
as a tech for a bunch of Reservoir Engineers. We had a nice little super
computer simulating Prudhoe Bay holdings across a lot of wells over thousands
of feet of depth (for some variables) over time. But the output was a linear
mess (tape only) that the engineers would work with from huge printouts using
HP calculators. Eventually it was more than I could take any more. So I
transferred the data to disk in a clever format that loaded quickly and built
a pseudo-English formula engine for defining and computing formulas/data
sets/"cells" if you like and printing and plotting them. Various types of
original and computed values had various dimensionality up to 4 dimensions.
The underlying formula language was fairly sophisticated with around 200
production rules in the LALR parser I had no choice but to hand-roll. In
normal spreadsheet manner the derived variables/data-sets would recalculate
as any part of the underlying data or dependent defintions changed. A rich
set of scientific math fucntions was available and formulas could be defined
on various slices and selections of the data matrices using all available
mathematical functions and equations based on them. Formulas/eqations were
also named functions that could be used to derive other formulas. Too bad I
wasn't paying attention to micros and didn't realize I had the makings of a
multi-dimensional spreadsheet in hand at a time when a dumb 2-d data matrix
was about to take the world by storm. Ah well. Impetuous youth. I was
too busy having fun with the shiny toys.
- samantha
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