VisiCalc memories
Lovely report from Scott Rosenberg.

“As the father of twin three-year-old boys, I don’t get out much, I’m sorry to say. But I did head down to Silicon Valley last night for a special event hosted by the Computer History Museum. Titled “ The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc,” the panel discussion featured Dan Bricklin, who dreamed up VisiCalc; Bob Frankston, responsible for coding it; and Mitch Kapor, the father of Lotus 1-2-3, which succeeded VisiCalc in the spreadsheet marketplace. Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi moderated.

The story of VisiCalc is the stuff of software-industry legend: It is widely viewed as the original “killer app” for personal computing (though Simonyi said that that term was actually first applied to Lotus 1-2-3 and only later retroactively extended to VisiCalc itself). People would see a demo of the spreadsheet, or see a friend using it, and decide to go out and buy a computer so they could use it.

VisiCalc first achieved its popularity on the Apple II, but it ceded its market to Lotus when the IBM PC arrived: 1-2-3, which was coded to take advantage of the PC’s 16-bit processing (the Apple II and CP/M computers popular before the PC were 8-bit) seized the moment of this “platform transition” to take the lead. (The panel, which was being hosted at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, did not touch on the process by which Lotus, in turn, lost out to Microsoft’s Excel, as part of Microsoft’s cementing of its “Office suite” dominance in the ’90s.)

Though this is an oft-told story in the annals of computing, I learned a number of new things from listening to Bricklin and Frankston.

Bricklin explained that his father was a printer and that’s how he learned the importance of prototyping, doing quick mockups for customers first before you committed to stuff that was hard to change. He showed a manual page from a typesetting terminal, the Harris 2200, that also served as one inspiration for the spreadsheet, with its separate layers of data, calculations and formatting. He also mentioned that it was his backhround in computerized typesetting that inculcated in him the principle of “keystroke minimization” — because in that field, people were actually paid by the keystroke.

Bricklin and the other panelists agreed that VisiCalc succeeded because it was different from the kind of financial forecasting software that already existed — it was a free-form, general purpose tool, an electronic “back of the envelope.” It allowed non-programmers to do things at a level of complexity that, previously, you had to learn programming to accomplish.

Bricklin and Frankston recalled that their initial efforts to promote VisiCalc did not meet universal enthusiasm. Experienced computer people weren’t bowled over, Bricklin said; they would dismiss the spreadsheet with, “Hey, I can already do most of this in BASIC.” People who had no experience with computers tended to think that computers could do anything under the sun, and so VisiCalc didn’t wow them. “But when the accountants saw it — there was an accountant [at a particular computer store], he started shaking — he said, ‘This is what I do all day!'”

Kapor closed out the discussion with a tribute to this pioneering piece of software: “VisiCalc literally changed my life. It was a complete inspiration. I don’t think people remember what impact it had. It had an elegant minimalism — it got out of your way… My goal in life was to design something that could stand next to VisiCalc without embarrassment.”

As someone who was an undergraduate in Cambridge at the same time in the late ’70s that Bricklin was dreaming of a “magic typable blackboard” at the Harvard Business School, I found Bricklin’s photos from that era (posted on his own Web site here) evocative. Since I spent a lot of time in that era working on Compugraphic typesetting machines, I was amused and intrigued to hear him acknowledge his debt to the world of that technology.

Bricklin also displayed a copy of Inc. magazine from Jan. 1982, with a cover story on “The Birth of a New Industry” and a cover shot of Bricklin and Frankston. (You can see it on Bricklin’s site here.) As the photo appeared on the screen at the front of the lecture hall, someone in the crowd shouted, “Same shirt!” Then and now, Bricklin favored the plaid flannel look.”

Gimme a W! Gimme an M! Gimme a D! What’s that spell?
From Scott Rosenberg…

“As the statues of Saddam fall and waves of euphoria swell through Fox-News-land, unchecked by cautions from Bush and Rumsfeld, one little issue haunts the war effort: The reason we went to war in the first place remains strangely elusive.

The imminence of the Iraqi threat that the Bush administration identified as its reason for invading Iraq now, rather than wait for further U.N. inspections to do their work, was a matter of “weapons of mass destruction.” Iraq, we were led to believe, was a teeming arsenal of chemical poisons and biological weapons, and was on the verge of developing nuclear capabilities. At any moment Saddam might hand over such weapons to terrorists so they could wreak havoc on the homeland. There was no time to waste.

So far, however, the war in Iraq has been remarkably free of usage, or even sightings, of “WMD.”

There are many possible explanations: Maybe Saddam hid everything really well. Maybe he didn’t want to use these weapons because he knew that would convict him in the court of world opinion. Maybe he simply didn’t have such weapons on nearly the scale the U.S. charged.

We may never know the full story, but we will learn a lot more as the U.S. tightens its grip on Baghdad and the countryside and begins a more systematic search. Sooner or later, we will have a pretty clear idea whether Iraq was or was not teeming with WMD. A lot hangs on this. And if it turns out that the Bush administration’s claims in this area were inflated or wrong, it will be very interesting to see how the issue gets spun.”

Calendar ambushes

Two years ago today, my life fell apart. Sue and I had taken the children to Disneyland Paris for the weekend. We both loathed the place, but it was impossible not to revel in the pleasure the kids took in the park, the hotel (where we had a suite), the exotic experience of being abroad in a non-English environment. And then when we were dressing for breakfast, she came out of the shower, deathly pale, and said she had found a large lump in her breast. We knew it was serious from the word go. The drive back to the UK, during which we had to maintain an outwardly calm appearance for the sake of the children and the friends with whom we had embarked on what had seemed such a frivolous adventure, was the longest and most traumatic journey I’ve ever undertaken, but it was as nothing compared to what lay ahead. Eighteen months later, the love of my life was dead.

Steven Johnson brooding on DisneyWorld

Steven Johnson has been to a conference in Paris, but played truant for a while.

” The afternoon that I arrived I made a quick excursion to the Magic Kingdom solely to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. (In my experience, the EuroDisney version of Pirates is the best.) I’ve probably gone on that ride 25 times in my life, but this time, an entirely new thought occurred to me. Forgive the flair for the obvious here, but those pirates are terrorizing that town: they’re firing on it with huge cannons; they’re setting fire to houses; they’re drunkenly chasing after local women, presumably to rape them; they’re shooting off weapons indiscriminately into open windows. If you think about people in the actual Caribbean towns hundreds of years ago, being attacked by pirates must have been just about one of the most terrifying things you could imagine. Pirates were the Al Qaeda of the 18th century. But on the ride, they’re not even supposed to be scary; it’s all played for comic relief. All of which made me wonder: in two hundred years, when we’ve all moved on to new fears (gray goo and sentient machines, no doubt) will Disney roll out a new set of rides? Suicide Bombers of the Middle East? Terrorists of New York? ”

The arbitrariness of media attention

As we fret (rightly) about the casualties of war in Iraq, ponder this:

“The four-and-a-half year conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been described as the worst since World War II. An estimated 3.3 million people have died as a result of the war making it the “tragedy of modern times”, according to a report issued by the International Rescue Committee aid agency.”

Visual Neighbourhood

Just seen this intriguing tool in a link on Karlin Lillington’s wonderful Blog.

Stooping to conquer
From Dan Gillmor.

Virus Slimeballs’ Latest Trick. This is the text accompanying a new virus. It’s designed to trick you into opening the attachment by playing…

The fog of journalism

In an age of relentless, 24×7 television coverage, why is it that we don’t have a clue about what’s really going on? In this piece from The Atlantic, William Powers suggests that we need newspapers to penetrate the fog. Quote:

“There’s also an emerging star in The [Washington] Post, a reporter named Anthony Shadid who has been writing remarkable dispatches from Baghdad. On the morning of the first missile attack on Baghdad, he filed the most gripping, graceful account that I saw anywhere. At one point this week, he was inside the home of an Iraqi family that isn’t thrilled with Saddam, but is also terrified of and angered by the U.S. invasion: “To this family, the assault is an insult. It is not Hussein under attack, but Iraq, they said. It is hard to gauge if this is a common sentiment, although it is one heard more often as the war progresses. ‘We complain about things, but complaining doesn’t mean cooperating with foreign governments,’ the father said. ‘When somebody comes to attack Iraq, we stand up for Iraq. That doesn’t mean we love Saddam Hussein, but there are priorities.’ “

Anecdotal stuff, not necessarily representative of the broader Iraqi populace, but powerfully told. With U.S. soldiers meeting unexpected resistance on the battlefield that very day, Shadid put flesh on what was then the story of the hour: the possibility that coalition forces might not be as welcome as expected.

After reading that story, I went back to the television, and the fog descended again. It didn’t lift until the next morning, when the newspapers arrived.”

Well, up to a point. The image I have all the time at the moment is of looking through the wrong end of a telecope. What we have now is 600 wrong-ended telescopes in the form of the ’embedded’ journalists travelling with the marines. It’s impossible to figure out what’s really happening just from peering in to these instruments.

Solution to that awkward question: what to give George W. Bush for his sixth birthday

Why this tasteful little figurine. A snip at $19.95. [Thanks to Quentin for the link.]

Use a Firewall, Go to Jail
A dispatch from Professor Ed Felten.

“The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.

Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that “conceal from a communication service provider … the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication”. Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal — with no exceptions.

If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you’re in violation, because the “To” and “From” lines of the emails are concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)

Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the “from” and “to” fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security “firewalls” use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you’re in violation.

If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the “Internet Connection Sharing” feature of your favorite operating system product, you’re in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virtually all versions of Linux) would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.”