One of my more vivid memories from childhood was the guy who pulled up to the computer store in a Trans Am, walked up to the counter and said, "I want a Visicalc."
After the salesperson explained that it was a computer program which ran on an Apple ][, the guy said something to the effect of, "Set me up with what I need.", and the salesperson proceeded to put together pretty much one of everything in the store all of which was then loaded into the Trans Am, and after writing a check, the hopeful accountant drove off.
A while back, when I read the book _Diver's Down: Adventure Beneath Hawaiian Seas_ to my kids I had to explain what slide rules and adding machines and ledger sheets were --- it's really remarkable how we have finally reached Babbage's exclamation:
>"I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam."
I don't remember what I paid for PC and printer, but I'm sure my IBM PC clone (with dual floppies) was well into the $4K plus range in today's dollars in 1982 or so. And software wasn't cheap either. A hard disk would have added multiple thousands of dollars. (Where I was working paid $5K in then dollars for an Apple III hard disk.) When I went to grad school a couple of years later, I was one of very few people who owned a PC.
You're spot on. The IBM XT was introduced immediately after I graduated and went to work. My employer's employees got a 20% discount from IBM, as IBM was a client. I bought an XT (PC + 10MB hard drive) for $4K (list price $5K). A lot of money then for a new grad. The contrast between then and now is stunning.
And software costs... this was also the era when every "application" (think accounting software: accounts payable, payroll, accounts receivable, word processing) was $495 per application. A small business could easily pay $2-5K for basic software to run their business. And then, of course, it was a nightmare to setup and use and almost impossible to pull off without a "consultant".
But VisiCalc -- it was such a game changer. A totally different way of using a PC that enabled the "ordinary" non-computer person to become an order of magnitude more productive. I think Lotus 123 was the pinnacle of golden era of keyboard-driven spreadsheets, but it was only an incremental improvement over VisiCalc. The journey into the abyss began with Lotus Symphony.
I do like Excel and use it on occasion. But I pine for the days of lean software that did one thing exceptionally well.
> I think Lotus 123 was the pinnacle of golden era of keyboard-driven spreadsheets, but it was only an incremental improvement over VisiCalc.
They sat on their laurels with 123 v2 for much too long, and competitors surpassed them. v3 wasn't enough more to catch up.
Enable OA's spreadsheet module[1] was certainly head and shoulders above 123, offering real 3D capability (where what Excel views as multiple independent sheets could be addressed directly, so you could do things like have a layer for each month of an annual report, with the topmost being as @SUM() over the column of montly numbers below it), much richer set of functions, and integration with a database and word processor.
And there were others, too. I liked Lucid-3D, which wasn't really 3D but kinda fractal, where you could set up any given cell to drill into a sub-spreadsheet that was used to calculate a single value that would roll up into its parent. And Borland had a competitor, but I don't recall anything about that one.
[1] During college I had a part-time job working on this, on the testing team.
One cool thing we testers did to keep ourselves entertained was to build a spreadsheet casino. Each of us took on a given casino game to implement via spreadsheet macros. My game was blackjack, and it supported the full range of features: multiple decks, double-down, insurance, and all that.
Another guy did craps, the result of which was that we found a subtle bug in the app's random number generator. He set it up to play itself automatically and left it running overnight. When we came back in the next day, he was rich; that's not supposed to happen. He ran the test again the next night, and same thing. The bias in the RNG was causing rolls of 11 to happen more often than they should have.
I really wish multi-dimensional spreadsheets were more popular --- Lotus Improv was _amazing_, but unfortunately, Quantrix Financial is not something I could convince my employer to pay for, let alone justify for my own purchase, and sadly Flexisheet seems moribund.
Pyspread has some interesting features along those lines.
There were a number of alternative spreadsheet models trotted out over time. But things had pretty much coalesced around the 2D Visicalc/Lotus model for mainstream users. Excel did add features like pivot tables but, basically, once Microsoft Office became dominant with Windows that sort of cemented what an office suite looked liked at least until you added in video conferencing. So you don't, for example, really have a mainstream desktop publishing program that goes beyond the limitations of word processing offerings.
In practice, though, you need to upgrade to stay current. For software that people use as a daily driver, subscriptions are not obviously more expensive in general.
that's where we disagree: you don't usually need to stay current. as long as it does the job, it's current enough. if there's new features available that would add value to the business, then you have a business case to buy a new license. 95% of software update haven't really added any value since the early 00s.
I'm not sure I want to work at a company that nickels and dimes purchases to the degree that I'm running unsupported 20 year old software because someone in procurement doesn't think I need an upgrade unless I write up a business case for it. I assume they're equally cheap in many other ways.
So, in other words, you need to upgrade--or have a subscription. In fact, extended support agreements for some enterprise products are a premium offering that don't require moving up to the next version given the effort associated with backporting bug fixes for a fairly small base.
I went quite a ways up the parent chain without seeing anyone seriously proposing that. All executables become unusable eventually (except maybe for IBM mainframes), so "pay once and you're done forever" is inherently impossible.
Unless you keep running every part of the hardware / software stack, which works only until some piece of hardware wears out.
exe34 15 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> $495 per application.
it was a lifetime licence though. you can probably still run it today.
Also:
that's where we disagree: you don't usually need to stay current. as long as it does the job, it's current enough. if there's new features available that would add value to the business, then you have a business case to buy a new license. 95% of software update haven't really added any value since the early 00s.
-----
Maybe I misinterpreted but the implication is I could run something from the early 00s without changes which--while true in some cases--I wouldn't do in general.
> Maybe I misinterpreted but the implication is I could run something from the early 00s without changes
Yes, you did. If he meant that, he wasn't thinking. Some piece of your hardware won't work with the old software, unless it's also old. You get a new printer and there are no drivers for the old OS. The old software won't work with the new network. You want some new app and it doesn't work with the old software. Etc. Etc.
We ran into this in Google Patent Litigation all the time. You have to have old everything to run old software, whether your license is still good or not.
But I think we agree that paying for maintenance only, and no new features, is fair. Of course, most vendors don't want to do that; they want to shove new "features" down your throat.
When I worked for an enterprise Linux vendor, we definitely provided long-term support/maintenance options followed by security patches. It was mostly for government-related but also for some companies, especially those that were using it for embedded applications. But we also had meetings with those customers regularly who certainly weren't just installing the software and not touching it for 10+ years.
I've also known customers who have old software, e.g. for test systems, just running on old systems who basically don't breathe on the ancient systems. For years, United's entertainment system would also sometimes reboot to a 20+ year-old pre-Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel but that's not really a critical system.
There were these two clean-cut young men in short-sleeved white shirts and ties who came to my door and handed me a pamphlet. I think it was about that.
and that's why we ended up with agile and alpha crapware released every week, breaking functionality that used to work and moving everything useful around until you can't find it.
I spent about $3000 for an IBM PC and I forgot what the daisy wheel Diablo 630 printer was, maybe a couple grand. A hard disk for it wasn't available at the time.
DOS was $40. CPM/86 was something like $186. Which is why everybody bought DOS instead of CPM/86.
My first computer (other than single board CPU projects) was an H11. You can see it on my profile:
The Apple II was originally priced at $1298 in 1977 dollars, that's more than $6700 today. A "one of everything" setup would be 5-figures in today's dollars. Even the later Apple IIe cost over $4k adjusted to today's dollars.
Machrone's Law (the longtime editor of PC Magazine) was that the PC you wanted cost $5K in the currency of the time. And that held for quite a long time.
Believe me or not, but I loved the ads in early PC Magazine (that I usually read as a kid a couple months later in my public library in Brazil thanks to some unknown subscriber’s donation).
I used to daydream about the equipment in the ads like other kids did with cars in car magazines
There was a huge magazine called Computer Shopper back in the day. It wasn't 100% ads but it was a very high percentage of ads peppered with mostly pretty formulaic articles.
>Believe me or not, but I loved the ads in early PC Magazine
I believe you, ha ha. I used to do the same, with both PC Magazine and BYTE.
And with DDJ and CUJ too. :)
(Dr. Dobbs Journal and C Users Journal. Both of those had high quality articles on software topics, back then, and for many years.)
Early in my career, I read some books about it, including a few about programming for the 6502 processor, and later, Peter Norton's "Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC". I thought the latter book was very good, just like his Norton Utilities and other software.
I did a fair amount of hobby 6502 assembly language programming on the Commodore 64, and a bit on the BBC Micro. The Beeb had a cool inline assembly feature, using which you could write 6502 assembly code inline in the middle of your BBC BASIC code, just by wrapping the assembly code in square brackets. There was no need of an explicit assembly step. The inline assembly code would just run as part of the running of the BASIC code.
> Note: I have just learned that Bob Frankston also used VisiCalc to do his 1978 tax return. In the process, he discovered he needed a lookup table for the tax rates, and incorporated the @lookup command then and there.
One of most impressive and sad parts for me. Sad in the sense that nowadays everything is so complicated that you almost never can implement significant pieces of tech just because you need it and competent
Rather than be limited by Quark XPress and PageMaker, I learned and used TeX which has allowed me to do pretty much anything I can write a (La)TeX macro for --- current project is a recursive macro which takes a list of water systems and their connections and outputs each system's connections --- but it allows one to do pretty much anything one needs: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/31088/any-...
That said, I did do a lot of AppleScript programming, and the InDesign integration was esp. nice (even managed to write a script which could manage four-level deep indexes which was said to be impossible by Adobe's Scripting Evangelist).
I'd love to see a list of scriptable opensource applications --- some notable ones from memory:
It depends on the tools you use e.g., emacs is programmable not just in theory but in practice. Every key press executes a customizable command. It scales from just a few use-package tweaks in your init.el to complete apps such as Magit, Org-mode.
CLI tools can be easily composable and help automate everyday tasks: accept input from stdin/write results to stdout, put diagnostic on stderr, exit with non-zero code on error. Once you'd learned shell pipeline syntax in 1978, you are set for decades.
Modern web is less useful to support something like Yahoo pipes but there are http APIs that are relatively easy to access. Scraping might be an option still.
Combining ios shortcuts with Pythonista scripts can help on mobile.
I worked at a web hosting company in Atlanta back in 2002, called Interland. In 2003 we purchased a company called Trellix which let you build websites through a web interface. I remember our first meeting with Trellix when some guy walked through the door to the conference room; t-shirt covered by a flannel, ripped jeans, Converse, long hair and beard. I was like, “holy sh*t, it’s Dan Bricklin!” He was great to work with. One of those rare times you meet someone who can be listed as a big contributor to your field of work.
I worked on supporting Microsoft Multiplan back in those days.
One of the guys at work had been making a spreadsheet literally all night and at the end of the night he pressed the keys to exit Multiplan and it simply exited as it was told and he lost all his work - back then programs hadn't advanced to the point of asking "save before exit y/n?".
Lotus had a record-breaking (at the time) product launch cost of $1 million or so. Software products were never so splashy.
I was at Analytica (Reflex), which had a serious case of Lotus Envy: right down to the $495 price tag, and an expensive program to train computer store sales people (because that's how software got sold, you know /s ).
Reflex was sort of like a spreadsheet, but it was not positioned as a Lotus competitor. Even in the early 80's, that was seen as impossible for anyone except the gigantic players.
Reflex sold around 60 copies a week, burning $7 million of VC money, until Borland bought the company and cut the price to $99. Common shareholders (e.g. me) got nothing.
After the salesperson explained that it was a computer program which ran on an Apple ][, the guy said something to the effect of, "Set me up with what I need.", and the salesperson proceeded to put together pretty much one of everything in the store all of which was then loaded into the Trans Am, and after writing a check, the hopeful accountant drove off.
A while back, when I read the book _Diver's Down: Adventure Beneath Hawaiian Seas_ to my kids I had to explain what slide rules and adding machines and ledger sheets were --- it's really remarkable how we have finally reached Babbage's exclamation:
>"I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam."