VisiCalc’s Spreadsheets Changed the World

It’s the 40th anniversary of VisiCalc, the first popular spreadsheet program, and the anniversary has prompted some new remembrances of the killer app that, true to its “power to the people” origins, got people playing with data — and, by popularizing personal computers, helped to change the world. But the story really begins a year earlier in 1978, as Bricklin was watching his professor at Harvard Business School updating a grid of numbers by hand on a chalkboard…

In fact, years ago the word “spreadsheet” originally meant a hand-written table scrawled across both pages of an open ledger book. It tells future Harvard MBAs that VisiCalc was the “original ‘killer app’ of the information age,” and that it “forever changed how people use computers in business.”

Source: thenewstack.io