how many of you have usedan electronic spreadsheet, like microsoft excel? very good. now, how many of you have run a businesswith a spreadsheet by hand, like my dad did for his smallprinting business in philadelphia?
Meet the Steve Jobs of the Wedding Industry, a lot less. well, that's the way it was donefor hundreds of years. in early 1978,i started working on an idea that eventually became visicalc.
and the next year it shipped running on something newcalled an apple ii personal computer. you could tell that thingshad really changed when, six years later, the wall street journal ran an editorial that assumed you knew what visicalc wasand maybe even were using it. steve jobs back in 1990 said that "spreadsheetspropelled the industry forward." "visicalc propelled the success of applemore than any other single event." on a more personal note,
steve said, "if visicalc had been writtenfor some other computer, you'd be interviewingsomebody else right now." so, visicalc was instrumental in gettingpersonal computers on business desks. how did it come about? what was it? what did i go throughto make it be what it was? well, i first learned to programback in 1966, when i was 15 -- just a couple monthsafter this photo was taken. few high schoolers had accessto computers in those days. but through luckand an awful lot of perseverance,
i was able to getcomputer time around the city. after sleeping in the mud at woodstock,i went off to mit to go to college, where to make money,i worked on the multics project. multics was a trailblazinginteractive time-sharing system. have you heard of the linuxand unix operating systems? they came from multics. i worked on the multics versions of what are knownas interpreted computer languages, that are used by peoplein noncomputer fields
to do their calculationswhile seated at a computer terminal. after i graduated from mit, i went to work fordigital equipment corporation. at dec, i worked on software for the new areaof computerized typesetting. i helped newspapersreplace their reporters' typewriters with computer terminals. i'd write software and then i'd go out in the fieldto places like the kansas city star,
where i would train usersand get feedback. this was real-world experience that is quite differentthan what i saw in the lab at mit. after that, i was project leader of the software for dec's firstword processor, again a new field. like with typesetting, the important thingwas crafting a user interface that was both natural and efficientfor noncomputer people to use. after i was at dec, i wentto work for a small company that made microprocessor-based electroniccash registers for the fast-food industry.
but i had always wanted to starta company with my friend bob frankston that i met on the multics project at mit. so i decided to go back to school to learnas much as i could about business. and in the fall of 1977, i entered the mba programat harvard business school. i was one of the fewpercentage of students who had a backgroundin computer programming. there's a picture of me from the yearbooksitting in the front row. (laughter)
now, at harvard,we learned by the case method. we'd do about three cases a day. cases consist of up to a few dozen pagesdescribing particular business situations. they often have exhibits,and exhibits often have words and numbers laid out in ways that make sensefor the particular situation. they're usually all somewhat different. here's my homework. again, numbers, words,laid out in ways that made sense. lots of calculations --we got really close to our calculators.
in fact, here's my calculator. for halloween, i wentdressed up as a calculator. at the beginning of each class,the professor would call on somebody to present the case. what they would do isthey would explain what was going on and then dictate informationthat the professor would transcribe onto the many motorized blackboardsin the front of the class, and then we'd have a discussion. one of the really frustrating thingsis when you've done all your homework,
you come in the next dayonly to find out that you made an error and all of the other numbersyou did were wrong. and you couldn't participate as well. and we were marked by class participation. so, sitting there with 87 other peoplein the class, i got to daydream a lot. most programmers in those daysworked on mainframes, building things like inventory systems,payroll systems and bill-paying systems. but i had workedon interactive word processing and on-demand personal computation.
instead of thinkingabout paper printouts and punch cards, i imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one numberand wrote a new thing in, all of the other numberswould automatically change, like word processing with numbers. i imagined that my calculatorhad mouse hardware on the bottom of it and a head-up display,like in a fighter plane. and i could type some numbers in,and circle it, and press the sum button. and right in the middle of a negotiationi'd be able to get the answer.
now i just had to take my fantasyand turn it into reality. my father taught me about prototyping. he showed me mock-ups that he'd make to figure outthe placement on the page for the things for brochuresthat he was printing. and he'd use itto get feedback from customers and oks before he sent the joboff to the presses. the act of making a simple, workingversion of what you're trying to build forces you to uncover key problems.
and it lets you find solutionsto those problems much less expensively. so i decided to build a prototype. i went to a video terminal connected toharvard's time-sharing system and got to work. one of the first problemsthat i ran into was: how do you represent values in formulas? let me show you what i mean. i thought that you would point somewhere, type in some words,then type in some somewhere else,
put in some numbers and some more numbers,point where you want the answer. and then point to the first, press minus,point to the second, and get the result. the problem was:what should i put in the formula? it had to be somethingthe computer knew what to put in. and if you looked at the formula, you needed to knowwhere on the screen it referred to. the first thing i thought wasthe programmer way of doing it. the first time you pointed to somewhere,
the computer would ask youto type in a unique name. it became pretty clear pretty fast thatthat was going to be too tedious. the computer had to automaticallymake up the name and put it inside. so i thought, why not make it bethe order in which you create them? i tried that. value 1, value 2. pretty quickly i sawthat if you had more than a few values you'd never rememberon the screen where things were. then i said, why not instead ofallowing you to put values anywhere, i'll restrict you to a grid?
then when you pointed to a cell, the computer could putthe row and column in as a name. and, if i did it like a map and put abcacross the top and numbers along the side, if you saw b7 in a formula, you'd know exactlywhere it was on the screen. and if you had to type the formulain yourself, you'd know what to do. restricting you to a gridhelped solve my problem. it also opened up new capabilities,like the ability to have ranges of cells. but it wasn't too restrictive --
you could still put any value,any formula, in any cell. and that's the way we do it to this day,almost 40 years later. my friend bob and i decided that we weregoing to build this product together. i did more work figuring out exactlyhow the program was supposed to behave. i wrote a reference cardto act as documentation. it also helped me ensurethat the user interface i was defining could be explained conciselyand clearly to regular people. bob worked in the attic of the apartmenthe rented in arlington, massachusetts. this is the inside of the attic.
bob bought time on the mit multics system to write computer codeon a terminal like this. and then he would download test versionsto a borrowed apple ii over a phone lineusing an acoustic coupler, and then we would test. for one of these tests i preparedfor this case about the pepsi challenge. print wasn't working yet,so i had to copy everything down. save wasn't working,so every time it crashed, i had to type in all of the formulasagain, over and over again.
the next day in class, i raised my hand;i got called on, and i presented the case. i did five-year projections.i did all sorts of different scenarios. i aced the case.visicalc was already useful. the professor said, "how did you do it?" well, i didn't want to tell himabout our secret program. so i said, "i took this and added this and multiplied by thisand subtracted that." he said, "well,why didn't you use a ratio?" i said, "hah! a ratio --that wouldn't have been as exact!"
what i didn't say was,"divide isn't working yet." eventually, though,we did finish enough of visicalc to be able to show it to the public. my dad printed up a sample reference card that we could use as marketing material. in june of 1979, our publisherannounced visicalc to the world, in a small booth at the giant nationalcomputer conference in new york city. the new york times hada humorous article about the conference. "the machines performwhat seem religious rites ...
even as the believers gather, the painters in the coliseum sign roomare adding to the pantheon, carefully lettering 'visicalc'in giant black on yellow. all hail visicalc!" (gasp) new york times:"all hail visicalc." that was the last mentionof the electronic spreadsheet in the popular business pressfor about two years. most people didn't get it yet. but some did.
in october of 1979, we shipped visicalc. it came in packagingthat looked like this. and it looked like thisrunning on the apple ii. and the rest, as they say, is history. now, there's an awful lotmore to this story, but that'll have to wait for another day. one thing, though, harvard remembers. here's that classroom. they put up a plaqueto commemorate what happened there.
(applause) but it also serves as a reminder that you, too, should takeyour unique backgrounds, skills and needs and build prototypes to discoverand work out the key problems, and through that, change the world. thank you.
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