Dan Bricklin, who wrote VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program and one of the great Killer Apps of all time, has released the Alpha version of a web app which does some of the things a spreadsheet does. Here’s how he describes it:

The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. It can be easily set up to publish to basic web server space accessed by FTP and there is no need to set up server-side programs like CGI. It can, though, run on a server and be used with nothing more than a browser on the client.

It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux under a GPL licence. Thank you, Dan.

More: More information here on the features Dan expects to be in the Beta version.