VisiCalc – the First Killer App of the Computer Era

Today the Internet and computers are so much a part of our daily lives that many of us would have a difficult time getting through an average day without them. In fact they are so integrated into our lives that we hardly notice them at times.

But it wasn't always this way. A mere three decades ago computers were huge machines that were housed in large, climate controlled rooms. They were the property of large corporations and used mainly by trained professionals. Yes, there were some small computers on the market - the Apple I and Apple II, the Alto from Xerox, the Commodore-64, the Commodore-PET, the Sinclair ZX-80 from Britain and others. However, with the exception of the Alto which was used by researchers at Xerox, the market for small computers was pretty much limited to hobbyists. The small computer's were basically a novelty item that electronics enthusiasts could play with in their spare time. Oh, the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) at Apple Computer had dreams of marketing their computers to the masses and, their machine being more user friendly than most other small computers, did begin to penetrate a home market beyond the that dominated by electronics enthusiasts. But it was still mainly a novelty item with little practical use.

In retrospect, small computer's prior to 1983 were basically solutions in search of a problem. What was needed, in the words of boosters of the infant microcomputer industry, was a so called killer application or killer app which propel the industry into the mainstream.

The killer app made its appearance in October of 1979 in the form of a program called VisiCalc. Retailing for $99, VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for microcomputers. It was the brainchild of Dan Brinklin, an MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who, with the help of his friend Bob Frankston, developed what Brinklin described as a word processing program for accounting. For centuries, accountants have done their work on specially printed paper, laid out in a row and column format, referred to as a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is a simple and elegant way to display and analyze accounting data. However, in addition to being time consuming and tedious to build, paper spreadsheets have two serious limitations. The first is that a single error in arithmetic can result in all of the subsequent numbers being in error. Second, if one is trying to do forecasting and wants to change a variable, all of the math has to be re-done by hand to get the new result. Brinklin's idea was to create a computer program that, when a user changed a number, all of the numbers related to that number would automatically change just like when a change is made to wording on a word processing document the page automatically realigns the text to accommodate the change.

VisiCalc proved immediately to be the killer app that was needed to move these new small personal computers from a hobbyist's toy to a useful tool. Sales of Apple Computers shot up immediately and many retailers began selling Apple Computers with VisiCalc already installed. VisiCalc allowed business people to literally breeze through work that involved number crunching as they could simply enter the numbers into the computer once for a project or scenario and then simply change variables without having to erase and manually recalculate every number related to the changed variable in order to see the new result. It also reduced errors since once the user entered their formulas the computer did all of the arithmetic.

As word spread, many business people who were in the habit of bringing work home from the office to finish at night began using a computer and VisiCalc to get the work done faster, thereby giving them more free time at home. Then some began hitting on the idea that, rather than bringing the work home to the computer, why not take the computer from home to the office and do all of their work there. Thus began the revolution that changed modern business. Until this time, office workers had to rely on the IT Department for their reports and data. The IT Department would dutifully deliver the standard reports as scheduled but workers then had to take the date in the report and do their number crunching by hand which was laborious and time consuming. It could take months or years, if ever, before the IT people would get around to programming a new report that provided information in a format that a manager needed. With VisiCalc and the PC, workers and managers could take the raw data from existing IT produced reports and manipulate it to themselves to get what they needed. Even better, the cost of an Apple II computer and VisiCalc in the early 1980s was about $1,300 which, while expensive for individuals, was low enough that most middle managers could purchase them as easily as other office supplies without having to obtain approval from superiors higher up the line (in contrast, mini-computers which were also making in roads into offices especially in the word processing area cost between $50,000 and $100,000 while mainframes were in the millions).

Thanks to VisiCalc personal computers became a standard business tool and the tiny PC industry quickly grew to become a mainstay of the world economy.

Dan Brinklin on his website has a working copy of the IBM version of his VisiCalc program which IBM and Lotus Development (now owned by IBM and which previously brought the rights to VisiCalc years ago) has allowed him to give away. It will run on Windows. Click here for the download.