Talk:VisiCalc/Archives/2013

"... and in time ..."?

What does "and in time the copyright" mean? Is this a particular use of US English with which I am unfamiliar, or an error? --Anonymous

It does seem OK to use this phrase in US English, yes. AFAIK, it means roughly the same as "... with the passage of time ...", or, "... eventually ...". --Wernher 20:49, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Ray Ozzie's role?

"Ozzie was instrumental in the development of Lotus Symphony and Software Arts Inc.’s TK!Solver and VisiCalc..." -from his bio at Microsoft. Instrumental how? --Snori 00:30, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Factual accuracy

The factual accuracy of part of the article is disputed. The article states:

"Though the electronic spreadsheet was a revolutionary idea, Bricklin was advised that he would be unlikely to be granted a patent, so he failed to profit significantly from his invention. At the time [presumably in 1979], patent law had not been successfully applied to software."

The content of the article software patent (see section: Early example of a software patent) contradicts this last sentence, pointing to software patents granted back in the early sixties.. --Edcolins 22:13, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

The statement in the article is correct for the US. As the software patents article says:

The USPTO maintained this position, that software was in effect a mathematical algorithm, and therefore not patentable into the 1980's. [In 1981], the court essentially ruled that while algorithms themselves could not be patented, devices that utilized them could.... by the early 1990s the patentability of software was well established...

I will add the phrase "in the US" to the article and remove the dispute tag. --Macrakis 22:49, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, this sounds fair. --Edcolins 16:53, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Lotus?

Lotus aquired VisiCalc, and stopped development. I think this fact needs documenting.

Platforms

The article says: "After the Apple II version, VisiCalc was also released for the Atari 8-bit family, the Commodore PET (both based on the MOS Technology 6502 processor, like the Apple), TRS-80 (based on the Zilog Z80 processor) and the IBM PC[2]."

where "2" is a link to http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/0922.html -- but I see nothing in this article about Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, or Visicalc for MS-DOS.

The only reference to ports of Visicalc I see are the last 2 sentences of that page: "Eventually, VisiCorp sued Software Arts when the company delayed development of VisiCalc for the IBM PC so they could first finish a version for the Apple IIe and III. Eventually, Software Arts' assets were sold to Lotus, which unsurprisingly stopped development of VisiCalc."

It's not clear from this that there ever was a port of Visicalc to any other platform -- except maybe the Apple III? Maybe there was, but this reference doesn't say so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.235.7.36 (talk) 07:13, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

am not too sure

Spreadsheets on computers existed way before from some old German software. I think it was the marketing aspect via DOS that got things going —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.18.192.21 (talk) 06:01, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Source

"VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, was one of -- if not the -- single-most important pieces of software in PC history. As Paul Laughton, who wrote Apple's DOS, put it, VisiCalc was "the thing that [made] microcomputers take off."

""If you knew VisiCalc, and what it did, and you were a skilled salesperson, and the right person came in the door," said Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of VisiCalc (along with Bob Frankston). "You could probably sell them a fully-loaded machine." "

• The untold story behind Apple's $13,000 operating system.84.152.36.245 (talk) 21:48, 4 April 2013 (UTC)