#visicalc — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #visicalc, aggregated by home.social.
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Как VisiCalc помог Стиву Джобсу в продаже Apple II
На дворе начало 80-х. Параллельно и следом за LANPAR были разработаны по меньшей мере еще три варианта компьютерного бюджетирования, причем его результаты можно было вывести на экран монитора в виде бухгалтерской таблицы, полюбоваться ей и потом распечатывать на принтере. Только эти бухгалтерские таблицы не были интерактивными, любой их пересчет, даже из-за исправления одной цифры, исполнялся заново после каждого изменения ввода или формул, и — главное — между компьютером и бухгалтером по-прежнему была целая цепочка посредников из программистов и операторов компьютера. Что сводило на нет всю скорость компьютерных вычислений, и чего не было, когда бухгалтер наедине со старым добрым настольным калькулятором сам потихоньку сводил дебет с кредитом. Кардинально изменить ситуацию можно было лишь одним способом — поставить перед бухгалтером на стол персональный компьютер, запрограммированный на выведение на экран бухгалтерской графики в виде таблиц и моментальный их автоматический перерасчет по заданным алгоритмам при исправлении в них любых цифр. Потенциально способные на это ПК появились во второй половине 70-х годов. А первым, кто смог заставить их это делать, был 27-летний студент Гарвардской школы бизнеса Даниэль Бриклин.
https://habr.com/ru/companies/onlinepatent/articles/1062542/
#apple #стив_джобс #visicalc #apple_2 #apple_ii #история_it #история_успеха #история_создания #биография
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“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple”*…
Bryan DonkinJason Toon on a man whose applied creativity birthed not one, but two major industries…
Global canned food sales are now more than $210 billion annually. The average American eats about 200 pounds of canned food every year. Meanwhile the worldwide paper industry has seen steep falls in the production of newsprint, printing paper, and writing paper since 2010, but the rise in paper and cardboard packaging has more than made up for it. The paper industry is bigger than ever, with revenue of $485 billion in 2025.
For better or worse, our world would simply not look the same today without these two industries. And one person was the key figure in starting both of them. Bryan Donkin can legitimately claim to be the “father” of the canned-food industry and the paper industry as we know them. So who was he, besides one of the very few guys named Bryan in the 18th century?
Born in northeastern England in 1768, Bryan Donkin went into the same business as his father: real estate. But it didn’t speak to him. So in 1792, at the rather ripe age of 24, he became an apprentice to John Hall at Dartford Iron Works to pursue his true calling as an engineer.
At the time, all paper was made by hand, more or less the same way it had been done since the Middle Ages. Cotton and linen rags were soaked in water and beaten into a pulp. A shallow, rectangular mold with a screen bottom would be dipped into the liquid slurry and shaken. A thin layer of the macerated fibers would settle on the screen; when dry, you’d have yourself a single sheet of paper.
Donkin started his post-apprenticeship career making these molds. But around 1801, he got connected to the Fourdrinier brothers, who produced stationery in London. They’d made a deal with a French inventor, Louis-Nicolas Robert, to bring a new paper-making machine to Britain. At the time, between the post-revolutionary turmoil in France and England’s more advanced industrial base, the latter seemed to hold more lucrative prospects for the new invention.
Unlike the laborious single-sheet, mold-based method, this new “Fourdrinier machine” used a cylinder to continuously produce rolls of paper. A mechanism called the “shake” agitated the conveyor belt at a high speed, to spread the wet pulp fibers in an even layer. Unfortunately, this rapid movement put a lot of strain on the mostly wooden machine. One of Donkin’s improvements was to use metal parts instead, for improved stability and precision.
Another refinement of his was adjusting the rollers that squeezed the water out of the paper, to maximize contact between them and the paper, to dry the paper more quickly and thoroughly. This and other improvements turned the Fourdrinier machine from an interesting prototype to a viable technical advancement.
It quickly became the industry standard, and remains so over 200 years later. The publishing boom of the late 19th and early 20th century wouldn’t have been possible without it. Those big machines you see today producing rolls of paper are most likely Fourdrinier machines. Donkin also made some key advancements in printing technology, so the Pulitzers and Murdochs of the world owe him double gratitude.
His fortune secured, now the head of a company bearing his name that still exists (these days they make gas valves), Donkin’s restless mind turned to another puzzle: the preservation of food. Like too many technological quests, this one was spurred by military needs. Best frenemies England and France were both spreading their empires around the planet, frequently clashing, and looking for ways to keep their troops fed. In such wide-ranging conflicts as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), far more sailors died of malnutrition than in combat.
It seems yet another French inventor had visions of pounds sterling dancing in his eyes. Philippe de Girard had come up with a method of preserving food by putting in inside a sealed tin container, then boiling the container in water to sterilize it. Or maybe he swiped the method from another French inventor, Nicolas Appert [see here]. Or maybe they were in cahoots. What we do know is that in 1810, de Girard went to London and engaged a merchant named Peter Durand to be his frontman for getting a British patent, which de Girard would not have been eligible for since Britain and France were at war.
Durand was duly awarded the patent in his name. Ever since, he’s been often called the inventor of the tin can, despite having nothing to do with inventing it, and doing nothing with it except selling the patent for £1,000 in 1812. The buyer? Bryan Donkin’s old apprenticeship master, John Hall.
Now on equal terms as budding titans of industry, Hall put up the money and Donkin provided the brains along with a third partner, John Gamble, to bring tin canning to an industrial scale. Again, it took a couple of years, but Donkin and Gamble steadily refined the process. One of their major innovations was to use iron coated in a thin layer of tin, combining the strength of the former with the non-reactive properties of the latter for an imperturbable can that could survive the longest, roughest ocean voyages.
For the second time, a French invention plus Donkin’s enhancements equaled le jackpot. After getting the likes of Queen Charlotte and the Duke of Wellington hooked with some free samples of canned beef, the firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble received an order for 156 pounds of canned food from the Admiralty in 1813. That grew to 2,939 pounds the following year, increasing annually to 9,000 pounds by 1821.
Having bested the canning challenge, Donkin again wandered off in search of other worlds to conquer: helping Charles Babbage with the “difference engine” that would eventually become the computer, consulting on bridge and canal projects, inventing the first metal pen and a screw-cutting machine, being a founding member of both the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Astronomical Society.
He died in 1855, an esteemed eminence in Victorian scientific and engineering circles. Today Bryan Donkin’s impact is out of all proportion to his memory. On a visit to his grave in London, the BBC found, [there was] no mention of his achievements. Cemetery staff didn’t know who he was.
I can sense the question from some quarters of the audience: are Bryan Donkin’s achievements worth celebrating? Not only did canned food help enable imperial conquest and war, it also led eventually to the mass industrialization of food production, with its attendant crises of public health and monocultural farming, and our psychological distance from our food supply. And one look at any municipal dump will show you how much paper and cardboard waste still goes into landfill, even in a supposedly “paperless world”.
Those points are well taken. But it’s easier to dismiss these advancements when you live in a world that’s always known them. Over the last century or two, large-scale paper production enabled the rise of mass literacy, from only 10% of the world’s population being literate in 1820 to 90% today.
And it’s not just British seamen who eat better because of canned food. A 2011-2013 National Institutes of Health study found that people who eat six or more canned items a week “consume more nutrient-dense food groups such as fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and protein-rich foods, and also have higher intakes of 17 essential nutrients” including potassium, calcium, and fiber. Canned food has helped overcome the tyrannies of distance and time to get more nutrition to more people.
From the perspective of people in 1810, both food canning and mass paper production were immense steps forward. We can’t lay our subsequent inability to maintain some equilibrium at their feet. It’s true that Bryan Donkin didn’t invent the machines he perfected. Both industries probably would have happened, in some form, eventually, without him. But in being the first to perfect them for large-scale use, and granting all the downsides they’ve brought along with them, he hastened the coming of a less hungry, more educated world. Not bad for a guy named Bryan…
How one genius fathered both the canning and paper industries: “The Lives of Bryan,” from @jasontoon.bsky.social.
* Willy Wonka (in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
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As we devise, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Dan Bricklin; he was born on this date in 1951. An engineer, he was the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. Known as “the father of the Spreadsheet,” he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1981 for VisiCalc and was one of six people spotlighted when “the Computer” was named “Machine of the Year” by Time magazine in 1982.
Neither Bricklin nor Frankston reaped huge financial profits from their spreadsheet program, though it sold over a half-million copies by 1983. At the time, copyright protection was not generally sought for software; their company was subsequently acquired by Lotus 1-2-3, which became the new spreadsheet standard (until, of course, Excel).
#BryanDonkin #cannedFood #canning #cardboard #culture #DanBricklin #Food #foodPreservation #history #paper #papermaking #Science #spreadsheet #Technology #VisiCalc -
🖥️ Ah, yes, the riveting tale of how spreadsheets—those glorified tables that haunt our work lives—came to be. #VisiCalc, the "GameBoy game" of its time, apparently revolutionized #computing with its primitive charm and jaw-dropping 16K RAM requirement. 🙄 One can only imagine the thrill of rebuilding a 1979 relic while the rest of us are busy enjoying the luxury of actual modern technology. 😂
https://zserge.com/posts/visicalc/ #spreadsheets #techhistory #nostalgia #HackerNews #ngated -
Serge Zaitsev @zserge explains how to develop a minimal VisiCalc clone in C.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@stonetoolsblog/116184728275122986
I've been good friends with #VisiCalc over the past five years, but I've always turned my nose up at #Lotus123 for some reason. "Thinks he's so special. He's not special. Just a copycat wannabe jerk and..." well, I'll save all that for therapy.
I finally broke down and learned it, and you know what? I didn't hate it. I liked it, even. Maybe I even... loved it?!
#retrocomputing -
🪨 Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC w/DOS 🛠️
Did you know that #Lotus123 is still referenced in Microsoft #Excel documentation to this day, but not #visicalc I finally spent some time getting to know VisiCalc's literal killer. When I struggled to get a chart made, I turned to the only one who could help me: an AI. From 1986!
#retrocomputing #spreadsheet -
Here's some tech nostalgia for you: "... comprehensive documentation of the original #VisiCalc source code for the Apple II, focusing on creating a fully annotated version of the 6502 assembly code."
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I'm using #Visicalc to plan a personal project. Some thoughts:
Getting a DOS emulator working on macOS is increasingly annoying.
Visicalc is great :).
Driving from the keyboard is _wonderful_.
Seems to only work in 80x25 mode even when i switch in DOS.
Annoying bug when saving where it fails to overwrite an existing file (in fact, deletes it).
The date and time in the emulated DOS seems to be wrong, probably not accounting for suspend/resume.
Lacks conventional cut-and-paste (it predates it). -
RE: https://typo.social/@drj/115610281330535782
Babes, wake up, i just realised something cool about the file format of the first spreadsheet program from 1979. #visicalc
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I just realised something cool about the Visicalc file format. The entire file is a series of Visicalc keyboard commands. In other words the save file is a (large) keyboard macro.
My file starts:
>B31:"B
>A31:"Soggy Goo
>C30:"FQZ&«>» goes to the cell given by X and Y; «:» isn't a keyboard command, but appears where [Return] would be. «"B» is how you enter "B" as a label in that cell. And so on for all the cells of the sheet. It appears to start from the bottom-most row.
#Visicalc
1/2 -
Spreadsheets Apple ][ Style - It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, you had big pap... - https://hackaday.com/2025/10/26/spreadsheets-apple-style/ #retrocomputing #spreadsheets #visicalc #apple2
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🎓🤪 Welcome to Fantasy Island University, where you'll "unlearn" OOP and finally discover the mythical art of "functions"! 📚💡 Dive into the past with Classical Software Studies and reminisce over relics like #VisiCalc, because who needs modern tech anyway? 🕰️✨
https://prog21.dadgum.com/210.html #FantasyIslandUniversity #unlearnOOP #ClassicalSoftwareStudies #functions #HackerNews #ngated -
🪨🛠️ New Post: "VisiCalc on the Apple 2"
Happy #SpreadsheetDay! This time I look at #visicalc, the first spreadsheet. Though I have a good deal of personal experience with it, I've never looked at it with a critical eye. How much of its DNA still exists in the software of today? I try to answer that by calculating protein levels of ration formulation for swine, as one does. Special guest appearance by your favorite grain: sorghum!
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#Visicalc was an absolute game changer.
Many folks purchased an Apple ][ back in the day just so they could use Visicalc.
I know my dad was constantly using Visicalc and thus disrupting my game time. ;-)
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New Video "Strausss on Spreadsheets: Seeds of Greatness AND Destruction!"
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A profile of VisiCalc co-creator @danb Dan Bricklin.
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@thomasareed it's quite interesting rabbit hole, if I understand things correctly the reason why it does what it does, is that back in VisiCalc there was no way to look up a "bracket"
And I guess back then people read the manual so they knew it had to be sorted and it won't be exact.
I have no idea why it has not been deprecated though. Sure, backwards compatibility is important but in this case I think it would have been a net good to fix it a long time ago.
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@nina_kali_nina VisiCalc on my 80 column Commodore PET a week or so back. It still runs just fine.
#commodore #commodorepet #visicalc #visicorp #vintagecomputing
