VisiCalc started it, but 1-2-3 finished it. "It" being the discussion of what a spreadsheet can be, and also VisiCalc itself.
What would a piece of software have to do today to make you cheer and applaud upon seeing a demo? I don't mean the "I'm attending a keynote and this is expected, please don't glower at me Mr. Pichai," polite-company type of applause. I mean the "Everything's different now." kind.
For that, the bar is pretty high these days. "Photorealistic" fight scenes between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise against an apocalyptic cityscape are generated out of nothing but a wish, and social media, smelling the cynical desperation, can offer no more than a clenched-teeth grimace. Within 48 hours the cold light of the epic battle has faded, leaving no residual heat.
A sense of awe was easier to elicit back in the golden era. Bill Atkinson scrubbed out some pixels with an eraser in MacPaint to thunderous applause. Andy Warhol did a flood fill on an image capture of Debbie Harry, leaving an audience enraptured.
Perhaps miracles work best when they're minor.
A common story says the engineers panicked when Warhol used flood fill, but that story is disputed, especially for the version of ProPaint demoed at the time. Warhol's original Amiga disks were re-discovered not too long ago.
Mitch Kapor has been on the receiving end of the adulation. As CEO of newly-formed Lotus Corporation, demos of their flagship product 1-2-3 generated significant light and heat with the crowds. In a 2004 interview with the Computer History Museum, Kapor said, "You could with one-click see the graph from your spreadsheet. You could not do that before. That was the killer feature when we demo’d it. I mean, literally, people used to applaud – as hard as it is to believe."
He knew all too well the struggles of the VisiCalc crowd, having previously built VisiPlot and VisiTrend for VisiCorp. Those programs worked with VisiCalc data to draw graphs, but required a lot of disk swapping to move in and out of the various programs when fine-tuning charts and graphs. 48K on the Apple 2 made it essentially impossible to fit all of the software into memory at once, but they could at least put everything onto the same diskette, Kapor reasoned. Eliminating that song and dance would be useful to the customers.
Depicted as a literal song-and-dance in their advertising.
In an interview in Founders at Work, Kapor said, "At various times I raised a number of ideas with the publisher about combining (VisiCalc and VisiPlot onto one disk) and they weren't interested at all. I don't think they really saw me as an equal. They saw me, when I was there as a product manager, as an annoyance—as a marginal person without experience or credentials who was kind of a pest. And I suppose I was kind of a pest."
... continue reading