This design-first approach is the hallmark of many successful products. It is the rare engineer who can say "I had to change code that I had labored over" with such equanimity. Excellent read!
"The ability for Dan and I to work as a team was crucial. While he could've written the program, the fact that he wasn't gave him the freedom to focus on what the program should do rather than how to do it. I could appreciate his reasons and would eventually accept that I had to change code that I had labored over. We were able to find ways to take advantage of the limited space available for the program in deciding what features to include or not include."
If the user typed a character before the keyboard input buffer was emptied it would be lost.
Huh. I never noticed this. Then I recalled that my Apple ][ had a Videx Keyboard Enhancer. Turns out it provided an input buffer (besides providing upper/lower case which is the primary reason we added it). Now I'm wondering how much latency the buffer added and whether it reduced my high score on Lode Runner.
This is the kind of articles i cross my fingers to find in HN. This is a landmark application and it's great to be able to look inside the decisions required for it's successful creation.
Visicalc was a landmark application and landmarks have multiple implications. On the one hand, it advanced computer capacities forward. On the other hand, it created a language of spreadsheets and of any spread-sheet-like-use of a computer and this language has been used ever since. And the thing about language is that having one language forecloses the possibility of other languages.
There are not many technical articles that are in addition well-written. I think the market would be small but I would like to read biographies about people Jobs, Gates or others but from a technical perspective.
> We did want to have enough precision to handle large numbers for both scientific calculations and in the unrealistic case it would be used to calculate the United States budget. Of course, as it turned out, that was one of the real applications.
What a gem. I have to say, so many of the hackers from the past strike me as fundamentally humble people. Some might say they were naieve, but this is a wonderful cautionary tale about the value of worst case thinking.
> Once we formed the company we decided to buy our own computer... The first project was to implement a simple editor and then an assembler and other development tools.
Different times, for sure. How I admire the men and women who forged a new profession during the wild west of computing!
The upper left corner links to "Bob's other writings." So presumably it's by Bob.
Click on it and you'll see the full name is "Bob Frankston". It's Bob's web site.
Further click on "bio" and read http://rmf.vc/Bob_Frankston_Bio to confirm "1979-1985 Founded Software Arts in 1979 with Dan Bricklin to develop and sell VisiCalc."
"The ability for Dan and I to work as a team was crucial. While he could've written the program, the fact that he wasn't gave him the freedom to focus on what the program should do rather than how to do it. I could appreciate his reasons and would eventually accept that I had to change code that I had labored over. We were able to find ways to take advantage of the limited space available for the program in deciding what features to include or not include."