Nice to see VisiCalc getting some recognition. A lot of people seem to credit Lotus 1-2-3 as the original spreadsheet, but people had already been buying Apple computers primarily to run VisiCalc for four years when 1-2-3 came out. It's hard to appreciate, looking back, what a mind-blowing thing it was to make changes in one part of a spreadsheet and have the other parts automatically update, and for this capability to be in the hands of ordinary people instead of specialists (or those who could afford to hire specialists). No programming required. Suddenly, a whole lot of people could do a kind of modeling and projection that had been out of reach before. "Killer app" definitely applies.
I'm of the opinion that spreadsheets are programming and, in fact, represent their own paradigm of data-focused, document-centric programming with tons of implicit parallelism and, as you mentioned, implicit control flow similar to declarative languages.
It's sneaking pure functional programming in through the back door, in fact, and it's only a conceit that it somehow isn't programming.
Another amazing fact is that, once you take inflation into account, the Apple computers they were buying cost around as much as the just-announced Mac Pro!
Well over $5,000, and people paid it - for a spreadsheet.
I paid close to $2,000 in 1984 to buy my Apple //e at the Harvard Coop with the disk drive, monitor, and extended 80-column card. To put it in perspective, my private college expenses were $8,000 the same year.
THE killer app for businesses. Math types, simulator types (even the Human Genome Project did early work on the Apple ][), computer hobby-geeks and gamers (with too much extra coin) were natural markets, but all small.
For business, a word-processor, at the time, you could take it or leave it, because a good pool typist and a dictaphone was all an executive needed. But, being able to do "What-If" on various business assumptions, in real-time, was a game-changer (esp. w/ all the consolidation M&A happening w/ conglomerates at the time).
You couldn't even buy that with real money before...
> For business, a word-processor, at the time, you could take it or leave it, because a good pool typist and a dictaphone was all an executive needed.
You could also buy a literal "word processor"—a piece of hardware much cheaper than a general-purpose computer, akin to a fancy electronically-buffered typewriter.
The full power of a computer with pixel-framebuffer display, wasn't really needed for what we today think of as "basic word processing" tasks. The goal of early word-processing software was either just to save you the trivial expense of an electronic word-processor (sort of like a calculator app saves you the expense of buying an electronic calculator); or to be full-blown desktop publishing software.
I felt ashamed that throughout my career I never got to know Visicalc. I recently read 'The innovators' and got to know from it. It's good that some authors putting effort in researching better to attribute the credits in the right way.
