Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet | Dan Bricklin

380,923 views ・ 2017-02-01

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Translator: Crawford Hunt Reviewer: Brian Greene
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How many of you have used an electronic spreadsheet,
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like Microsoft Excel?
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Very good.
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Now, how many of you have run a business with a spreadsheet by hand,
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like my dad did for his small printing business in Philadelphia?
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A lot less.
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Well, that's the way it was done for hundreds of years.
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In early 1978, I started working on an idea
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that eventually became VisiCalc.
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And the next year it shipped
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running on something new called an Apple II personal computer.
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You could tell that things had really changed when, six years later,
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the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial
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that assumed you knew what VisiCalc was and maybe even were using it.
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Steve Jobs back in 1990
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said that "spreadsheets propelled the industry forward."
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"VisiCalc propelled the success of Apple more than any other single event."
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On a more personal note,
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Steve said, "If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer,
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you'd be interviewing somebody else right now."
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So, VisiCalc was instrumental in getting personal computers on business desks.
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How did it come about?
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What was it? What did I go through to make it be what it was?
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Well, I first learned to program back in 1966, when I was 15 --
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just a couple months after this photo was taken.
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Few high schoolers had access to computers in those days.
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But through luck and an awful lot of perseverance,
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I was able to get computer time around the city.
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After sleeping in the mud at Woodstock, I went off to MIT to go to college,
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where to make money, I worked on the Multics Project.
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Multics was a trailblazing interactive time-sharing system.
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Have you heard of the Linux and Unix operating systems?
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They came from Multics.
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I worked on the Multics versions
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of what are known as interpreted computer languages,
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that are used by people in noncomputer fields
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to do their calculations while seated at a computer terminal.
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After I graduated from MIT,
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I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation.
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At DEC, I worked on software
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for the new area of computerized typesetting.
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I helped newspapers replace their reporters' typewriters
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with computer terminals.
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I'd write software
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and then I'd go out in the field to places like the Kansas City Star,
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where I would train users and get feedback.
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This was real-world experience
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that is quite different than what I saw in the lab at MIT.
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After that, I was project leader
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of the software for DEC's first word processor, again a new field.
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Like with typesetting, the important thing was crafting a user interface
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that was both natural and efficient for noncomputer people to use.
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After I was at DEC, I went to work for a small company
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that made microprocessor-based electronic cash registers for the fast-food industry.
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But I had always wanted to start a company with my friend Bob Frankston
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that I met on the Multics project at MIT.
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So I decided to go back to school to learn as much as I could about business.
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And in the fall of 1977,
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I entered the MBA program at Harvard Business School.
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I was one of the few percentage of students
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who had a background in computer programming.
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There's a picture of me from the yearbook sitting in the front row.
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(Laughter)
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Now, at Harvard, we learned by the case method.
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We'd do about three cases a day.
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Cases consist of up to a few dozen pages describing particular business situations.
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They often have exhibits, and exhibits often have words and numbers
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laid out in ways that make sense for the particular situation.
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They're usually all somewhat different.
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Here's my homework.
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Again, numbers, words, laid out in ways that made sense.
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Lots of calculations -- we got really close to our calculators.
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In fact, here's my calculator.
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For Halloween, I went dressed up as a calculator.
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(Laughter)
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At the beginning of each class, the professor would call on somebody
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to present the case.
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What they would do is they would explain what was going on
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and then dictate information that the professor would transcribe
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onto the many motorized blackboards in the front of the class,
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and then we'd have a discussion.
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One of the really frustrating things is when you've done all your homework,
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you come in the next day only to find out that you made an error
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and all of the other numbers you did were wrong.
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And you couldn't participate as well.
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And we were marked by class participation.
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So, sitting there with 87 other people in the class, I got to daydream a lot.
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Most programmers in those days worked on mainframes,
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building things like inventory systems, payroll systems and bill-paying systems.
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But I had worked on interactive word processing
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and on-demand personal computation.
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Instead of thinking about paper printouts and punch cards,
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I imagined a magic blackboard
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that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in,
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all of the other numbers would automatically change,
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like word processing with numbers.
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I imagined that my calculator had mouse hardware on the bottom of it
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and a head-up display, like in a fighter plane.
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And I could type some numbers in, and circle it, and press the sum button.
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And right in the middle of a negotiation I'd be able to get the answer.
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Now I just had to take my fantasy and turn it into reality.
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My father taught me about prototyping.
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He showed me mock-ups
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that he'd make to figure out the placement on the page
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for the things for brochures that he was printing.
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And he'd use it to get feedback from customers
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and OKs before he sent the job off to the presses.
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The act of making a simple, working version of what you're trying to build
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forces you to uncover key problems.
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And it lets you find solutions to those problems much less expensively.
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So I decided to build a prototype.
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I went to a video terminal connected to Harvard's time-sharing system
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and got to work.
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One of the first problems that I ran into was:
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How do you represent values in formulas?
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Let me show you what I mean.
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I thought that you would point somewhere,
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type in some words, then type in some somewhere else,
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put in some numbers and some more numbers, point where you want the answer.
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And then point to the first, press minus, point to the second,
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and get the result.
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The problem was: What should I put in the formula?
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It had to be something the computer knew what to put in.
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And if you looked at the formula,
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you needed to know where on the screen it referred to.
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The first thing I thought was the programmer way of doing it.
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The first time you pointed to somewhere,
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the computer would ask you to type in a unique name.
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It became pretty clear pretty fast that that was going to be too tedious.
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The computer had to automatically make up the name and put it inside.
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So I thought, why not make it be the order in which you create them?
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I tried that. Value 1, value 2.
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Pretty quickly I saw that if you had more than a few values
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you'd never remember on the screen where things were.
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Then I said, why not instead of allowing you to put values anywhere,
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I'll restrict you to a grid?
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Then when you pointed to a cell,
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the computer could put the row and column in as a name.
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And, if I did it like a map and put ABC across the top and numbers along the side,
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if you saw B7 in a formula,
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you'd know exactly where it was on the screen.
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And if you had to type the formula in yourself, you'd know what to do.
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Restricting you to a grid helped solve my problem.
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It also opened up new capabilities, like the ability to have ranges of cells.
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But it wasn't too restrictive --
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you could still put any value, any formula, in any cell.
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And that's the way we do it to this day, almost 40 years later.
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My friend Bob and I decided that we were going to build this product together.
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I did more work figuring out exactly how the program was supposed to behave.
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I wrote a reference card to act as documentation.
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It also helped me ensure that the user interface I was defining
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could be explained concisely and clearly to regular people.
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Bob worked in the attic of the apartment he rented in Arlington, Massachusetts.
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This is the inside of the attic.
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Bob bought time on the MIT Multics System
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to write computer code on a terminal like this.
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And then he would download test versions to a borrowed Apple II
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over a phone line using an acoustic coupler,
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and then we would test.
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For one of these tests I prepared for this case about the Pepsi Challenge.
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Print wasn't working yet, so I had to copy everything down.
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Save wasn't working, so every time it crashed,
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I had to type in all of the formulas again, over and over again.
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The next day in class, I raised my hand; I got called on, and I presented the case.
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I did five-year projections. I did all sorts of different scenarios.
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I aced the case. VisiCalc was already useful.
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The professor said, "How did you do it?"
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Well, I didn't want to tell him about our secret program.
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(Laughter)
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So I said, "I took this and added this
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and multiplied by this and subtracted that."
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He said, "Well, why didn't you use a ratio?"
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I said, "Hah! A ratio -- that wouldn't have been as exact!"
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What I didn't say was, "Divide isn't working yet."
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(Laughter)
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Eventually, though, we did finish enough of VisiCalc
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to be able to show it to the public.
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My dad printed up a sample reference card
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that we could use as marketing material.
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In June of 1979, our publisher announced VisiCalc to the world,
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in a small booth at the giant National Computer Conference in New York City.
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The New York Times had a humorous article about the conference.
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"The machines perform what seem religious rites ...
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Even as the believers gather,
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the painters in the Coliseum sign room are adding to the pantheon,
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carefully lettering 'VISICALC' in giant black on yellow.
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All hail VISICALC!"
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(Gasp) New York Times: "All hail VISICALC."
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(Laughter)
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That was the last mention of the electronic spreadsheet
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in the popular business press for about two years.
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Most people didn't get it yet.
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But some did.
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In October of 1979, we shipped VisiCalc.
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It came in packaging that looked like this.
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And it looked like this running on the Apple II.
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And the rest, as they say, is history.
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Now, there's an awful lot more to this story,
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but that'll have to wait for another day.
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One thing, though, Harvard remembers.
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Here's that classroom.
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They put up a plaque to commemorate what happened there.
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(Applause)
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But it also serves as a reminder
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that you, too, should take your unique backgrounds, skills and needs
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and build prototypes to discover and work out the key problems,
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and through that, change the world.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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