Podcast appearances and mentions of bob frankston

Interview with Dan Bricklin, VisiCalc Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics  Arcade Shopper  FutureVision Research   Hello, and welcome to episode 146 of the Floppy Days Podcast, for December, 2024.  I am Randy Kindig, your host for this podcast. This month I'm staying with the recent interview theme, as I continue to get the opportunity for interviews with some amazing icons from the early personal computer days. This month, that person is Dan Bricklin, co-developer of the iconic VisiCalc software that helped kickstart the sales of early personal computers like the Apple II and began the important spreadsheet software category that persists until today.  I published an interview with Dan's partner in VisiCalc (and in Software Arts), Bob Frankston, back in 2023, and now Dan adds to the story in his own words. Please note that I do plan to get back into producing episodes covering specific vintage computers.  I've just had an amazing run of interview opportunities in recent months, which has reduced the time I had to do the research on computers for the podcast.  Coming up in 2025 will be coverage of machines like the HP97, the Lobo Max-80, the Dragon, and the C64.  

Nelumbo nucifera, or the sacred lotus, is a plant that grows in flood plains, rivers, and deltas. Their seeds can remain dormant for years and when floods come along, blossom into a colony of plants and flowers. Some of the oldest seeds can be found in China, where they're known to represent longevity. No surprise, given their level of nitrition and connection to the waters that irrigated crops by then. They also grow in far away lands, all the way to India and out to Australia. The flower is sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism, and further back in ancient Egypt. Padmasana is a Sanskrit term meaning lotus, or Padma, and Asana, or posture. The Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley civilization shows a diety in what's widely considered the first documented yoga pose, from around 2,500 BCE. 2,700 years later (give or take a century), the Hindu author and mystic Patanjali wrote a work referred to as the Yoga Sutras. Here he outlined the original asanas, or sitting yoga poses. The Rig Veda, from around 1,500 BCE, is the oldest currently known Vedic text. It is also the first to use the word “yoga”. It describes songs, rituals, and mantras the Brahmans of the day used - as well as the Padma. Further Vedic texts explore how the lotus grew out of Lord Vishnu with Brahma in the center. He created the Universe out of lotus petals. Lakshmi went on to grow out of a lotus from Vishnu as well. It was only natural that humans would attempt to align their own meditation practices with the beautiful meditatios of the lotus. By the 300s, art and coins showed people in the lotus position. It was described in texts that survive from the 8th century. Over the centuries contradictions in texts were clarified in a period known as Classical Yoga, then Tantra and and Hatha Yoga were developed and codified in the Post-Classical Yoga age, and as empires grew and India became a part of the British empire, Yoga began to travel to the west in the late 1800s. By 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave lectures at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.  More practicioners meant more systems of yoga. Yogendra brought asanas to the United States in 1919, as more Indians migrated to the United States. Babaji's kriya yoga arrived in Boston in 1920. Then, as we've discussed in previous episodes, the United States tightened immigration in the 1920s and people had to go to India to get more training. Theos Bernard's Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience brought some of that knowledge home when he came back in 1947. Indra Devi opened a yoga studio in Hollywood and wrote books for housewives. She brought a whole system, or branch home. Walt and Magana Baptiste opened a studio in San Francisco. Swamis began to come to the US and more schools were opened. Richard Hittleman began to teach yoga in New York and began to teach on television in 1961. He was one of the first to seperate the religious aspect from the health benefits. By 1965, the immigration quotas were removed and a wave of teachers came to the US to teach yoga. The Beatles went to India in 1966 and 1968, and for many Transcendental Meditation took root, which has now grown to over a thousand training centers and over 40,000 teachers. Swamis opened meditation centers, institutes, started magazines, and even magazines. Yoga became so big that Rupert Holmes even poked fun of it in his song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” in 1979. Yoga had become part of the counter-culture, and the generation that followed represented a backlash of sorts. A common theme of the rise of personal computers is that the early pioneers were a part of that counter-culture. Mitch Kapor graduated high school in 1967, just in time to be one of the best examples of that. Kapor built his own calculator in as a kid before going to camp to get his first exposure to programming on a Bendix. His high school got one of the 1620 IBM minicomputers and he got the bug. He went off to Yale at 16 and learned to program in APL and then found Computer Lib by Ted Nelson and learned BASIC. Then he discovered the Apple II.  Kapor did some programming for $5 per hour as a consultant, started the first east coast Apple User Group, and did some work around town. There are generations of people who did and do this kind of consulting, although now the rates are far higher. He met a grad student through the user group named Eric Rosenfeld who was working on his dissertation and needed some help programming, so Kapor wrote a little tool that took the idea of statistical analysis from the Time Shared Reactive Online Library, or TROLL, and ported it to the microcomputer, which he called Tiny Troll.  Then he enrolled in the MBA program at MIT. He got a chance to see VisiCalc and meet Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who introduced him to the team at Personal Software. Personal Software was founded by Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings when they published Microchips for the KIM-1 computer. That led to ports for the 1977 Trinity of the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 and by then they had taken Bricklin and Franston's VisiCalc to market. VisiCalc was the killer app for those early PCs and helped make the Apple II successful. Personal Software brought Kapor on, as well as Bill Coleman of BEA Systems and Electronic Arts cofounder Rich Mellon. Today, software developers get around 70 percent royalties to publish software on app stores but at the time, fees were closer to 8 percent, a model pulled from book royalties. Much of the rest went to production of the box and disks, the sales and marketing, and support. Kapor was to write a product that could work with VisiCalc. By then Rosenfeld was off to the world of corporate finance so Kapor moved to Silicon Valley, learned how to run a startup, moved back east in 1979, and released VisiPlot and VisiTrend in 1981. He made over half a million dollars in the first six months in royalties.  By then, he bought out Rosenfeld's shares in what he was doing, hired Jonathan Sachs, who had been at MIT earlier, where he wrote the STOIC programming language, and then went to work at Data General. Sachs worked on spreadsheet ideas at Data General with a manager there, John Henderson, but after they left Data General, and the partnership fell apart, he worked with Kapor instead. They knew that for software to be fast, it needed to be written in a lower level language, so they picked the Intel 8088 assembly language given that C wasn't fast enough yet. The IBM PC came in 1981 and everything changed. Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs started Lotus in 1982. Sachs got to work on what would become Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor turned out to be a great marketer and product manager. He listened to what customers said in focus groups. He pushed to make things simpler and use less jargon. They released a new spreadsheet tool in 1983 and it worked flawlessly on the IBM PC and while Microsoft had Multiplan and VisCalc was the incumbent spreadsheet program, Lotus quickly took market share from then and SuperCalc. Conceptually it looked similar to VisiCalc. They used the letter A for the first column, B for the second, etc. That has now become a standard in spreadsheets. They used the number 1 for the first row, the number 2 for the second. That too is now a standard. They added a split screen, also now a standard. They added macros, with branching if-then logic. They added different video modes, which could give color and bitmapping. They added an underlined letter so users could pull up a menu and quickly select the item they wanted once they had those orders memorized, now a standard in most menuing systems. They added the ability to add bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. One could even spread their sheet across multiple monitors like in a magazine. They refined how fields are calculated and took advantage of the larger amounts of memory to make Lotus far faster than anything else on the market. They went to Comdex towards the end of the year and introduced Lotus 1-2-3 to the world. The software could be used as a spreadsheet, but the 2 and 3 referred to graphics and database management. They did $900,000 in orders there before they went home. They couldn't even keep up with the duplication of disks. Comdex was still invitation only. It became so popular that it was used to test for IBM compatibility by clone makers and where VisiCalc became the app that helped propel the Apple II to success, Lotus 1-2-3 became the app that helped propel the IBM PC to success. Lotus was rewarded with $53 million in sales for 1983 and $156 million in 1984. Mitch Kapor found himself. They quickly scaled from less than 20 to 750 employees. They brought in Freada Klein who got her PhD to be the Head of Employee Relations and charged her with making them the most progressive employer around. After her success at Lotus, she left to start her own company and later married. Sachs left the company in 1985 and moved on to focus solely on graphics software. He still responds to requests on the phpBB forum at dl-c.com. They ran TV commercials. They released a suite of Mac apps they called Lotus Jazz. More television commercials. Jazz didn't go anywhere and only sold 20,000 copies. Meanwhile, Microsoft released Excel for the Mac, which sold ten times as many. Some blamed the lack os sales on the stringent copy protection. Others blamed the lack of memory to do cool stuff. Others blamed the high price. It was the first major setback for the young company.  After a meteoric rise, Kapor left the company in 1986, at about the height of their success. He  replaced himself with Jim Manzi. Manzi pushed the company into network applications. These would become the center of the market but were just catching on and didn't prove to be a profitable venture just yet. A defensive posture rather than expanding into an adjacent market would have made sense, at least if anyone knew how aggressive Microsoft was about to get it would have.  Manzi was far more concerned about the millions of illegal copies of the software in the market than innovation though. As we turned the page to the 1990s, Lotus had moved to a product built in C and introduced the ability to use graphical components in the software but not wouldn't be ported to the new Windows operating system until 1991 for Windows 3. By then there were plenty of competitors, including Quattro Pro and while Microsoft Excel began on the Mac, it had been a showcase of cool new features a windowing operating system could provide an application since released for Windows in 1987. Especially what they called 3d charts and tabbed spreadsheets. There was no catching up to Microsoft by then and sales steadily declined. By then, Lotus released Lotus Agenda, an information manager that could be used for time management, project management, and as a database. Kapor was a great product manager so it stands to reason he would build a great product to manage products. Agenda never found commercial success though, so was later open sourced under a GPL license. Bill Gross wrote Magellan there before he left to found GoTo.com, which was renamed to Overture and pioneered the idea of paid search advertising, which was acquired by Yahoo!. Magellan cataloged the internal drive and so became a search engine for that. It sold half a million copies and should have been profitable but was cancelled in 1990. They also released a word processor called Manuscript in 1986, which never gained traction and that was cancelled in 1989, just when a suite of office automation apps needed to be more cohesive.  Ray Ozzie had been hired at Software Arts to work on VisiCalc and then helped Lotus get Symphony out the door. Symphony shipped in 1984 and expanded from a spreadsheet to add on text with the DOC word processor, and charts with the GRAPH graphics program, FORM for a table management solution, and COM for communications. Ozzie dutifully shipped what he was hired to work on but had a deal that he could build a company when they were done that would design software that Lotus would then sell. A match made in heaven as Ozzie worked on PLATO and borrowed the ideas of PLATO Notes, a collaboration tool developed at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana  to build what he called Lotus Notes.  PLATO was more more than productivity. It was a community that spanned decades and Control Data Corporation had failed to take it to the mass corporate market. Ozzie took the best parts for a company and built it in isolation from the rest of Lotus. They finally released it as Lotus Notes in 1989. It was a huge success and Lotus bought Iris in 1994. Yet they never found commercial success with other socket-based client server programs and IBM acquired Lotus in 1995. That product is now known as Domino, the name of the Notes 4 server, released in 1996. Ozzie went on to build a company called Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft, who appointed him one of their Chief Technology Officers. When Bill Gates left Microsoft, Ozzie took the position of Chief Software Architect he vacated. He and Dave Cutler went on to work on a project called Red Dog, which evolved into what we now know as Microsoft Azure.  Few would have guessed that Ozzie and Kapor's handshake agreement on Notes could have become a real product. Not only could people not understand the concept of collaboration and productivity on a network in the late 1980s but the type of deal hadn't been done. But Kapor by then realized that larger companies had a hard time shipping net-new software properly. Sometimes those projects are best done in isolation. And all the better if the parties involved are financially motivated with shares like Kapor wanted in Personal Software in the 1970s before he wrote Lotus 1-2-3. VisiCalc had sold about a million copies but that would cease production the same year Excel was released. Lotus hung on longer than most who competed with Microsoft on any beachhead they blitzkrieged. Microsoft released Exchange Server in 1996 and Notes had a few good years before Exchange moved in to become the standard in that market. Excel began on the Mac but took the market from Lotus eventually, after Charles Simonyi stepped in to help make the product great.  Along the way, the Lotus ecosystem created other companies, just as they were born in the Visi ecosystem. Symantec became what we now call a “portfolio” company in 1985 when they introduced NoteIt, a natural language processing tool used to annotate docs in Lotus 1-2-3. But Bill Gates mentioned Lotus by name multiple times as a competitor in his Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1995. He mentioned specific features, like how they could do secure internet browsing and that they had a web publisher tool - Microsoft's own FrontPage was released in 1995 as well. He mentioned an internet directory project with Novell and AT&T. Active Directory was released a few years later in 1999, after Jim Allchin had come in to help shepherd LAN Manager. Notes itself survived into the modern era, but by 2004 Blackberry released their Exchange connector before they released the Lotus Domino connector. That's never a good sign. Some of the history of Lotus is covered in Scott Rosenberg's 2008 book, Dreaming in Code. Others are documented here and there in other places. Still others are lost to time. Kapor went on to invest in UUNET, which became a huge early internet service provider. He invested in Real Networks, who launched the first streaming media service on the Internet. He invested in the creators of Second Life. He never seemed vindictive with Microsoft but after AOL acquired Netscape and Microsoft won the first browser war, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation and so helped bring Firefox to market. By 2006, Firefox took 10 percent of the market and went on to be a dominant force in browsers. Kapor has also sat on boards and acted as an angel investor for startups ever since leaving the company he founded. He also flew to Wyoming in 1990 after he read a post on The WELL from John Perry Barlow. Barlow was one of the great thinkers of the early Internet. They worked with Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. The EFF has since been the nonprofit who leads the fight for “digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.” So not everything is about business.    

Floppy Days 126 - Interview with Bob Frankston, Co-developer of Visicalc Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics  Arcade Shopper   Hello, everyone!  Welcome to episode 126 of the Floppy Days Podcast, with yours truly, Randy Kindig, as the host. Everyone, and I mean everyone, listening to this podcast has surely heard of the ground-breaking application (for its time) Visicalc.  Visicalc was the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II by VisiCorp on October 17, 1979.  It is considered the killer application for the Apple II, turning the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, and then prompting IBM to introduce the IBM PC two years later.  More than 700,000 copies were sold in six years, and up to 1 million copies over its history.   Initially developed for the Apple II computer, VisiCalc was ported to numerous platforms, both 8-bit and some of the early 16-bit systems, such as the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80 (TRSDOS), CP/M, MS-DOS, and even the HP Series 80. VisiCalc was later replaced in the market by Lotus 1-2-3 and eventually by Microsoft's Excel, which is the dominant spreadsheet today.  Spreadsheets, along with word processors, and presentation tools are still today considered one of the key applications for computing. Bob Frankston, along with Dan Bricklin, are the co-inventors of VisiCalc.  This month, we have an interview with the aforementioned Bob Frankston.  Bob was kind enough to take time to talk with me about what it was like to create such a ground-breaking tool. Before doing that, I have a few new acquisitions to discuss and I'll tell you about upcoming computer shows. New Acquisitions/What I've Been Up To Retro Innovations  Lige and the YouTube show “The Commodore Room” - https://www.youtube.com/@thecommodoreroom4554  Console5 (cap kits)  Upcoming Shows The 64 bits or less Retro Gaming Festival - June 3-4 - Benton County Fairgrounds in Corvallis, Oregon (sponsored by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo) - https://www.64bitsorless.com/  Boatfest Vintage Computer Exposition - June 23-25 - Hurricane, WV - http://boatfest.info  VCF Southwest - June 23-25 - Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX - http://vcfsw.org  Pacific Commodore Expo NW v4 - June 24-25 - “Interim” Computer Museum, Seattle, WA - https://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=pacommex:start  Kickstart Amiga UK Expo - July 1-2 - Nottingham, UK - https://www.amigashow.com/  KansasFest, the largest and longest running annual Apple II conference - July 18-23, 2023 (in-person) - July 29–30, 2023 (virtual) - Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri - https://www.kansasfest.org/  Southern Fried Gaming Expo and VCF Southeast - July 28-30 2023 - Atlanta, GA - https://gameatl.com/  ZZAP! Live 2023 - August 12 - The Holiday Inn, Kenilworth, CV8 1ED - https://fusionretroevents.co.uk/category/zzap-live/  Silly Venture SE (Summer Edition) - Aug. 17-20 - Gdansk, Poland - https://www.demoparty.net/silly-venture/silly-venture-2023-se  Fujiama 2023 - Aug. 30 - Sep. 3 - Lengenfeld, Germany - http://atarixle.ddns.net/fuji/2023/  VCF Midwest - September 9-10 - Waterford Banquets and Conference Center, Elmhurst, IL - http://vcfmw.org/  Tandy Assembly - Sep. 29-Oct. 1 - Courtyard by Marriott in Springfield, Ohio - http://www.tandyassembly.com/  AmiWest - October 14-15 - Sacramento, CA - https://retro.directory/browse/events/4/AmiWest.net  Portland Retro Gaming Expo - October 13-15, 2023 - Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR - https://retrogamingexpo.com/  Chicago TI International World Faire - October 14, 2023 - Evanston Public Library, Evanston, IL - http://chicagotiug.sdf.org/faire/   World of Commodore - Dec. 2-3, 2023 - Admiral Inn Mississauga, Mississauga, ON - http://www.worldofcommodore.ca/  http://chiclassiccomp.org/events.html  Facebook show listings - https://www.facebook.com/VintageComputerShows/  Interview Bob's Website - https://www.frankston.com/  New York Times article on Bricklin and Frankston joining Lotus (acquisition) - https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/10/business/business-people-former-friendly-rivals-joining-forces-at-lotus.html  Bob interview on TwitTV - https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/4 

Once upon a time, people were computers. It's probably hard to imagine teams of people spending their entire day toiling in large grids of paper, writing numbers and calculating numbers by hand or with mechanical calculators, and then writing more numbers and then repeating that. But that's the way it was before the 1979.  The term spreadsheet comes from back when a spread, like a magazine spread, of ledger cells for bookkeeping. There's a great scene in the Netflix show Halston where a new guy is brought in to run the company and he's flying through an electro-mechanical calculator. Halston just shuts the door. Ugh. Imagine doing what we do in a spreadsheet in minutes today by hand. Even really large companies jump over into a spreadsheet to do financial projections today - and with trendlines, tweaking this small variable or that, and even having different algorithms to project the future contents of a cell - the computerized spreadsheet is one of the most valuable business tools ever built. It's that instant change we see when we change one set of numbers and can see the impact down the line.  Even with the advent of mainframe computers accounting and finance teams had armies of people who calculated spreadsheets by hand, building complicated financial projections. If the formulas changed then it could take days or weeks to re-calculate and update every cell in a workbook. People didn't experiment with formulas. Computers up to this point had been able to calculate changes and provided all the formulas were accurate could output results onto punch cards or printers. But the cost had been in the millions before Digital Equipment and Data Nova came along and had dropped into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars  The first computerized spreadsheets weren't instant. Richard Mattessich developed an electronic, batch spreadsheet in 1961. He'd go on to write a book called “Simulation of the Firm Through a Budget Computer Program.” His work was more theoretical in nature, but IBM developed the Business Computer Language, or BCL the next year. What IBM did got copied by their seven dwarves. former GE employees Leroy Ellison, Harry Cantrell, and Russell Edwards developed AutoPlan/AutoTab, another scripting language for spreadsheets, following along delimited files of numbers. And in 1970 we got LANPAR which opened up more than reading files in from sequential, delimited sources. But then everything began to change. Harvard student Dan Bricklin graduated from MIT and went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation to work on an early word processor called WPS-8. We were now in the age of interactive computing on minicomputers. He then went to work for FasFax in 1976 for a year, getting exposure to calculating numbers. And then he went off to Harvard in 1977 to get his MBA. But while he was at Harvard he started working on one of the timesharing programs to help do spreadsheet analysis and wrote his own tool that could do five columns and 20 rows. Then he met Bob Frankston and they added Dan Fylstra, who thought it should be able to run on an Apple - and so they started Software Arts Corporation. Frankston got the programming bug while sitting in on a class during junior high. He then got his undergrad and Masters at MIT, where he spent 9 years in school and working on a number of projects with CSAIL, including Multics. He'd been consulting and working at various companies for awhile in the Boston area, which at the time was probably the major hub. Frankston and Bricklin would build a visible calculator using 16k of space and that could fit on a floppy. They used a time sharing system and because they were paying for time, they worked at nights when time was cheaper, to save money. They founded a company called Software Arts and named their Visual Calculator VisiCalc. Along comes the Apple II. And computers were affordable. They ported the software to the platform and it was an instant success. It grew fast. Competitors sprung up. SuperCalc in 1980, bundled with the Osborne. The IBM PC came in 1981 and the spreadsheet appeared in Fortune for the first time. Then the cover of Inc Magazine in 1982. Publicity is great for sales and inspiring competitors. Lotus 1-2-3 came in 1982 and even Boeing Computer Services got in the game with Boeing Calc in 1985. They extended the ledger metaphor to add sheets to the spreadsheet, which we think of as tabs today. Quattro Pro from Borland copied that feature and despite having their offices effectively destroyed during an earthquake just before release, came to market in 1989. Ironically they got the idea after someone falsely claimed they were making a spreadsheet a few years earlier. And so other companies were building Visible Calculators and adding new features to improve on the spreadsheet concept. Microsoft was one who really didn't make a dent in sales at first. They released an early spreadsheet tool called Multiple in 1982. But Lotus 1-2-3 was the first killer application for the PC.  It was more user friendly and didn't have all the bugs that had come up in VisiCalc as it was ported to run on platform after platform. Lotus was started by Mitch Kapor who brought Jonathan Sachs in to develop the spreadsheet software. Kapor's marketing prowess would effectively obsolete VisiCalc in a number of environments. They made TV commercials so you know they were big time! And they were written natively in the x86 assembly so it was fast. They added the ability to add bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. They added color and printing. One could even spread their sheet across multiple monitors like in a magazine. It was 1- spreadsheets, 2 - charts and graphs and 3 - basic database functions. Heck, one could even change the size of cells and use it as a text editor. Oh, and macros would become a standard in spreadsheets after Lotus. And because VisiCalc had been around so long, Lotus of course was immediately capable of reading a VisiCalc file when released in 1983. As could Microsoft Excel, when it came along in 1985. And even Boeing Calc could read Lotus 1-2-3 files. After all, the concept went back to those mainframe delimited files and to this day we can import and export to tab or comma delimited files. VisiCalc had sold about a million copies but that would cease production the same year Excel was released, although the final release had come in 1983. Lotus had eaten their shorts in the market, and Borland had watched. Microsoft was about to eat both of theirs. Why? Visi was about to build a windowing system called Visi-On. And Steve Jobs needed a different vendor to turn to. He looked to Lotus who built a tool called Jazz that was too basic. But Microsoft had gone public in 1985 and raised plenty of money, some of which they used to complete Excel for the Mac that year. Their final release in 1983 began to fade away And so Excel began on the Mac and that first version was the first graphical spreadsheet. The other developers didn't think that a GUI was gonna' be much of a thing. Maybe graphical interfaces were a novelty! Version two was released for the PC in 1987 along with Windows 2.0. Sales were slow at first. But then came Windows 3. Add Microsoft Word to form Microsoft Office and by the time Windows 95 was released Microsoft became the de facto market leader in documents and spreadsheets. That's the same year IBM bought Lotus and they continued to sell the product until 2013, with sales steadily declining. And so without a lot of competition for Microsoft Excel, spreadsheets kinda' sat for a hot minute. Computers became ubiquitous. Microsoft released new versions for Mac and Windows but they went into that infamous lost decade until… competition. And there were always competitors, but real competition with something new to add to the mix. Google bought a company called 2Web Technologies in 2006, who made a web-based spreadsheet called XL2WEB. That would become Google Sheets. Google bought DocVerse in 2010 and we could suddenly have multiple people editing a sheet concurrently - and the files were compatible with Excel. By 2015 there were a couple million users of Google Workspace, growing to over 5 million in 2019 and another million in 2020. In the years since, Microsoft released Office 365, starting to move many of their offerings onto the web. That involved 60 million people in 2015 and has since grown to over 250 million. The statistics can be funny here, because it's hard to nail down how many free vs paid Google and Microsoft users there are. Statista lists Google as having a nearly 60% market share but Microsoft is clearly making more from their products. And there are smaller competitors all over the place taking on lots of niche areas. There are a few interesting tidbits here. One is that the tools that there's a clean line of evolution in features. Each new tool worked better, added features, and they all worked with previous file formats to ease the transition into their product. Another is how much we've all matured in our understanding of data structures. I mean we have rows and columns. And sometimes multiple sheets - kinda' like multiple tables in a database. Our financial modeling and even scientific modeling has grown in acumen by leaps and bounds.  Many still used those electro-mechanical calculators in the 70s when you could buy calculator kits and build your own calculator. Those personal computers that flowed out in the next few years gave every business the chance to first track basic inventory and calculate simple information, like how much we might expect in revenue from inventory in stock to now thousands of pre-built formulas that are supported across most spreadsheet tooling. Despite expensive tools and apps to do specific business functions, the spreadsheet is still one of the most enduring and useful tools we have. Even for programmers, where we're often just getting our data in a format we can dump into other tools! So think about this. What tools out there have common file types where new tools can sit on top of them? Which of those haven't been innovated on in a hot minute? And of course, what is that next bold evolution? Is it moving the spreadsheet from a book to a batch process? Or from a batch process to real-time? Or from real-time to relational with new tabs? Or to add a GUI? Or adding online collaboration? Or like some big data companies using machine learning to analyze the large data sets and look for patterns automatically?  Not only does the spreadsheet help us do the maths - it also helps us map the technological determinism we see repeated through nearly every single tool for any vertical or horizontal market. Those stuck need disruptive competitors if only to push them off the laurels they've been resting on. 

Bob Frankston is an e engineer whose work has arguable been more responsible for how most people interact with the internet. You probably have never heard of him... but I have. After following Bob Frankston's IEEE column off and on since 2013 we were thrown together earlier this year on social media and was absolutely star struck when he agreed to this interview about 5G networks. As I suspected, 5G is more about marketing than technology, but it is also about getting around net neutrality. Listen and learn. --- This episode is sponsored by · Charity Promotion: BallotReady: The goal of this initiative is to increase voter education and encourage your listeners to get the vote out during the 2020 General Election this November. https://www.ballotready.org/ Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/crucialtech/support

Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "You Can't Separate Them Later" - Show #609, from Aug. 22, 2018 [(as long as you don't choose, everything remains possible)] Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "New Whirled Symphony" - From 1/10/18 The Police - "Every Breath You Take (Kenzo ambient guitar mix)" Ken - "Intro from "New Whirled Symphony" 1/10/18" Ken - "Intro "today" talking to intro January" The Beatles - "Eleanor Rigby (Strings Only)" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" [Not the leaked ones yet] Antonin Dvorak - "Symphony No. 9, E minor, Op. 95, ''From The New World''" The Beatles - "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) (loops)" Jeff Goldblum - "Tenspeed and Brownshoe" - Tenspeed and Brownshoe, episode 7 Mike Post and Pete Carpenter - "Tenspeed and Brownshoe theme" - Tenspeed and Brownshoe Jared Leto, Thomas Byrne, Jaco Van Dormael - "How do we distinguish between illusion and reality? If you mix the mashed potatoes and the sauce, you can't separate them later. It's forever." - Mr. Nobody George Frideric Handel - "Sarabande - Main Title" - Barry Lyndon s.t. George Frideric Handel - "Sarabande - Duel" - Barry Lyndon s.t. George Frideric Handel - "Sarabande - End titles" - Barry Lyndon s.t. Daniel Day Lewis, Michele Pfieffer, Joanne Woodward - "Excerpts" - The Age of Innocence Kurtwood Smith, Laura Harrington - "I'm living the same hour over and over again" - 12:01 PM [The short film Groundhog Day was based on] Jim Hamblin - "KCBS AM Radio news reporter" Gordy Broshear - "KFAT Radio, Girloy CA" Hunter Phillips, Chevrolet - "American Look" - American Look Wayne Dyer - "The Power of Intention" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" - OK Computer Ken - "It's just happening (this will change again)" - "Unbreaking Birth" - Unbreaking Birth - "Learning About Light" - Learning About Light Christopher Wilcha - "(Inside Columbia House music club corporate life)" - The Target Shoots First Monsanto - "Yay for pesticides" - Death to Weeds Live phone caller - "Nothing has made more sense" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" - OK Computer Ken - "Identification" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" - OK Computer Christopher Wilcha - "Actually, we don't make anything. What is the message? There isn't one, is there?" - The Target Shoots First Random Rab - "Apparently loops" Christopher Wilcha - "The relationship between marketing and creative services is defined by power. We are not stimulating a real market" - The Target Shoots First [We don't know whether we're in the cage looking out, or they're in the cage looking in.] Random Rab - "Apparently loops" CBS - "Maybe when I get older I can make more of my life. It's not what you want, it's what the supply and demand wants." - CBS Special Report: The Mall Monsanto - "Kill the roots system. This fair golfer is playing on a course that has not been treated." - Death to Weeds [Weeds have long been a problem on our nation's fine golf courses.] The Changing Face of Florida - "Florida citizens welcome industry" - The Changing Face of Florida Disney - "With your TV, you'll add a new dimension" - Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: The Futurism of Walt Disney Michele Pfieffer, Daniel Day Lewis - "Can you see me marrying Mae now?" - The Age of Innocence Miranda July - "If I say this, what does it make them do?" - New Society William S. Burroughs - "The Cut Up" [Yes, hello?] 3-2-1 Contact - "I think the needle's shot" - 3-2-1 Contact Season 1, Episode 2 ("Noisy/Quiet: The Ear") (Jan. 1980) Big Blood - "Oh Country loops" Camper Van Beethoven - "Sweethearts loops" - Key Lime Pie [Brief] Winona Ryder - "Interview" Orson Welles - "By the time we get to dubbing, there usually isn't any more money" - Filming The Trial Walter Murch - "Dialogue and sound effects are like the moon and the stars" Peter Sellers, Gene Shalit - "Interview on Being There" The Computer Comes to Marketing - "This company - which used to wait three weeks - now has them a day after the monthly accounts are close" - The Computer Comes to Marketing Steve Jobs - "Brainstorms with the NeXT team" Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin - "Visicalc turns a week's work into an hour" - History of Personal Computers Christopher Wilcha - "So far, I've been able to remain an anonymous entry-level assistant. After only a couple of weeks, I'm totally overwhelmed." - The Target Shoots First Seymour Papert - "This little girl is a virtuoso of improvisation on the computer" - Talking Turtle [The structure of the program has helped her isolate the problem in one bite-sized chunk.] About Logo - "Is it easy teaching your own sister? (No, it's very hard!) (Not the same procedure name!)" - About Logo [With other games, it's already done for you. But with Logo, you have to do it.] Live phone caller - "Fascinating. I'm digging it. I've got the groove. Keep it going." [What's the next thing that happened to you? Nothing.] Ken and live phone caller - "I want us to be completely safe all the time. Nothing will ever happen to us." Live phone caller - "Live freight train" Dan Bodah - "3 Train" - Dronecast on WFMU 11/19/08 Ken - "Everybody's going to be completely safe" Random Rab - "Apparently loops" Christopher Wilcha - "I make a rubbing of my nameplate, just to prove to my parents that I got the job" - The Target Shoots First Learning About Sound - "Up close, the smoke and the sound go together" - Learning About Sound Kurtwood Smith, Don Amendolia - "I don't want to live forever. Does it ever end? Is there a way out of the loop?" - 12:01 PM Ken - "It's all over (all the things you do, you can time them, watch them grow up, watch them fall down, accept it, fight it, it's all going to happen) Everything's going away." [The end (of You Can't Separate Them Later)] Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "July 2019 (new)" Random Rab - "Apparently loops" Ken - "Is it a false ending? Wednesday is never going to happen." Radiohead - "Let Down Minidisc leak loops" - OK Computer sessions Minidisc leak Tim Roth, Tom Stoppard - "There must have been a moment when we could've said no, and we missed it. We'll know better next time" - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Radiohead - "Let Down Minidisc leak loops" - OK Computer sessions Minidisc leak Live phone caller - "We've really missed you (mountains, gathering mushrooms). Archived for the rest of the digital life." Ken - "This recorded life, how long would it last?" Radiohead - "Let Down Minidisc leak loops" - OK Computer sessions Minidisc leak Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "One Step Closer" - Show #335, from Sept. 28, 2004 [Corporate propaganda, TV, bears: noise.] Exxon - "Energy For a Strong America" - Commercials from the 80's [For the children on the way, it'll be their world someday. One step closer at the end of every day. Here at Exxon, we pursue a long-range plan.] Lone Star Radio Network - "Tire Pressure" - Texas Clean Air Minute Lone Star Radio Network - "Breathing Polluted Air" - Texas Clean Air Minute Lone Star Radio Network - "Top 10 Air Pollution Tips" - Texas Clean Air Minute Ken - "Ending, screams fading" Sound effects - "Bears" - 49 Bears Joe Harnell - "The Lonely Man Theme" - The Incredible Hulk TV s.t. Live phone caller - "We're going off the air together (Well, isn't that something?)" http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/87403

Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "You Can't Separate Them Later" - Show #609, from Aug. 22, 2018 [(as long as you don't choose, everything remains possible)] Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "New Whirled Symphony" - From 1/10/18 The Police - "Every Breath You Take (Kenzo ambient guitar mix)" Ken - "Intro from "New Whirled Symphony" 1/10/18" Ken - "Intro "today" talking to intro January" The Beatles - "Eleanor Rigby (Strings Only)" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" [Not the leaked ones yet] Antonin Dvorak - "Symphony No. 9, E minor, Op. 95, ''From The New World''" The Beatles - "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) (loops)" Jeff Goldblum - "Tenspeed and Brownshoe" - Tenspeed and Brownshoe, episode 7 Mike Post and Pete Carpenter - "Tenspeed and Brownshoe theme" - Tenspeed and Brownshoe Jared Leto, Thomas Byrne, Jaco Van Dormael - "How do we distinguish between illusion and reality? If you mix the mashed potatoes and the sauce, you can't separate them later. It's forever." - Mr. Nobody George Frideric Handel - "Sarabande - Main Title" - Barry Lyndon s.t. George Frideric Handel - "Sarabande - Duel" - Barry Lyndon s.t. George Frideric Handel - "Sarabande - End titles" - Barry Lyndon s.t. Daniel Day Lewis, Michele Pfieffer, Joanne Woodward - "Excerpts" - The Age of Innocence Kurtwood Smith, Laura Harrington - "I'm living the same hour over and over again" - 12:01 PM [The short film Groundhog Day was based on] Jim Hamblin - "KCBS AM Radio news reporter" Gordy Broshear - "KFAT Radio, Girloy CA" Hunter Phillips, Chevrolet - "American Look" - American Look Wayne Dyer - "The Power of Intention" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" - OK Computer Ken - "It's just happening (this will change again)" - "Unbreaking Birth" - Unbreaking Birth - "Learning About Light" - Learning About Light Christopher Wilcha - "(Inside Columbia House music club corporate life)" - The Target Shoots First Monsanto - "Yay for pesticides" - Death to Weeds Live phone caller - "Nothing has made more sense" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" - OK Computer Ken - "Identification" Radiohead - "Let Down loops" - OK Computer Christopher Wilcha - "Actually, we don't make anything. What is the message? There isn't one, is there?" - The Target Shoots First Random Rab - "Apparently loops" Christopher Wilcha - "The relationship between marketing and creative services is defined by power. We are not stimulating a real market" - The Target Shoots First [We don't know whether we're in the cage looking out, or they're in the cage looking in.] Random Rab - "Apparently loops" CBS - "Maybe when I get older I can make more of my life. It's not what you want, it's what the supply and demand wants." - CBS Special Report: The Mall Monsanto - "Kill the roots system. This fair golfer is playing on a course that has not been treated." - Death to Weeds [Weeds have long been a problem on our nation's fine golf courses.] The Changing Face of Florida - "Florida citizens welcome industry" - The Changing Face of Florida Disney - "With your TV, you'll add a new dimension" - Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: The Futurism of Walt Disney Michele Pfieffer, Daniel Day Lewis - "Can you see me marrying Mae now?" - The Age of Innocence Miranda July - "If I say this, what does it make them do?" - New Society William S. Burroughs - "The Cut Up" [Yes, hello?] 3-2-1 Contact - "I think the needle's shot" - 3-2-1 Contact Season 1, Episode 2 ("Noisy/Quiet: The Ear") (Jan. 1980) Big Blood - "Oh Country loops" Camper Van Beethoven - "Sweethearts loops" - Key Lime Pie [Brief] Winona Ryder - "Interview" Orson Welles - "By the time we get to dubbing, there usually isn't any more money" - Filming The Trial Walter Murch - "Dialogue and sound effects are like the moon and the stars" Peter Sellers, Gene Shalit - "Interview on Being There" The Computer Comes to Marketing - "This company - which used to wait three weeks - now has them a day after the monthly accounts are close" - The Computer Comes to Marketing Steve Jobs - "Brainstorms with the NeXT team" Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin - "Visicalc turns a week's work into an hour" - History of Personal Computers Christopher Wilcha - "So far, I've been able to remain an anonymous entry-level assistant. After only a couple of weeks, I'm totally overwhelmed." - The Target Shoots First Seymour Papert - "This little girl is a virtuoso of improvisation on the computer" - Talking Turtle [The structure of the program has helped her isolate the problem in one bite-sized chunk.] About Logo - "Is it easy teaching your own sister? (No, it's very hard!) (Not the same procedure name!)" - About Logo [With other games, it's already done for you. But with Logo, you have to do it.] Live phone caller - "Fascinating. I'm digging it. I've got the groove. Keep it going." [What's the next thing that happened to you? Nothing.] Ken and live phone caller - "I want us to be completely safe all the time. Nothing will ever happen to us." Live phone caller - "Live freight train" Dan Bodah - "3 Train" - Dronecast on WFMU 11/19/08 Ken - "Everybody's going to be completely safe" Random Rab - "Apparently loops" Christopher Wilcha - "I make a rubbing of my nameplate, just to prove to my parents that I got the job" - The Target Shoots First Learning About Sound - "Up close, the smoke and the sound go together" - Learning About Sound Kurtwood Smith, Don Amendolia - "I don't want to live forever. Does it ever end? Is there a way out of the loop?" - 12:01 PM Ken - "It's all over (all the things you do, you can time them, watch them grow up, watch them fall down, accept it, fight it, it's all going to happen) Everything's going away." [The end (of You Can't Separate Them Later)] Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "July 2019 (new)" Random Rab - "Apparently loops" Ken - "Is it a false ending? Wednesday is never going to happen." Radiohead - "Let Down Minidisc leak loops" - OK Computer sessions Minidisc leak Tim Roth, Tom Stoppard - "There must have been a moment when we could've said no, and we missed it. We'll know better next time" - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Radiohead - "Let Down Minidisc leak loops" - OK Computer sessions Minidisc leak Live phone caller - "We've really missed you (mountains, gathering mushrooms). Archived for the rest of the digital life." Ken - "This recorded life, how long would it last?" Radiohead - "Let Down Minidisc leak loops" - OK Computer sessions Minidisc leak Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - "One Step Closer" - Show #335, from Sept. 28, 2004 [Corporate propaganda, TV, bears: noise.] Exxon - "Energy For a Strong America" - Commercials from the 80's [For the children on the way, it'll be their world someday. One step closer at the end of every day. Here at Exxon, we pursue a long-range plan.] Lone Star Radio Network - "Tire Pressure" - Texas Clean Air Minute Lone Star Radio Network - "Breathing Polluted Air" - Texas Clean Air Minute Lone Star Radio Network - "Top 10 Air Pollution Tips" - Texas Clean Air Minute Ken - "Ending, screams fading" Sound effects - "Bears" - 49 Bears Joe Harnell - "The Lonely Man Theme" - The Incredible Hulk TV s.t. Live phone caller - "We're going off the air together (Well, isn't that something?)" https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/87403

Atari Computer Roundtable In this episode of ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Computer Podcast: We got some of the biggest names of the current Atari computer community on a live, international conference call to ask: what’s happening in your Atari 8-bit world? Guests Thom Cherryholmes, Ethan Johnson, Joe Decuir, Simon Wells, Curt Vendel, Jeff Fulton, Nir Dary, and Roland Wassenberg. The conversation went in amazing and unexpected directions. READY! Recurring Links Floppy Days Podcast AtariArchives.org AtariMagazines.com Kevin’s Book “Terrible Nerd” New Atari books scans at archive.org ANTIC feedback at AtariAge Atari interview discussion thread on AtariAge ANTIC Facebook Page AHCS Eaten By a Grue   Donate to Ted Nelson project at: https://paypal.me/Savetz TEH: Tech Enthusiast Hour - https://tehpodcast.com What We’ve Been Up To Ted Nelson Junk Mail project https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail Sophia board project - 9-pin DIN to SCART to HDMI - http://atariage.com/forums/topic/258702-new-development-gtia-in-cpld/ Roundtable Discussion Thom Cherryholmes https://twitter.com/tschak https://www.irata.online Ethan Johnson https://twitter.com/GameResearch_E https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com Joe Decuir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Decuir Simon Wells https://ataribits.weebly.com/1088XEL.html https://atari8.co.uk/1088xel-u1mb-firmware-released/ http://www.vcfmw.org/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/278212-avgcart/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/258454-eclaire-xl-pcb-aka-atari-on-fpga-project/ Curt Vendel http://www.atarimuseum.com ANTIC Interview 220 - Scott Scheiman, 850 Interface, Telelink I Jeff Fulton http://www.atarimania.com/documents/The-Atari-Assembler.pdf https://www.facebook.com/intotheverticalblank/ Nir Dary http://www.Sellmyretro.com http://atariage.com/forums/topic/279849-avgcart-preorder-thread-i/ Roland Wassenberg http://atariwiki.org ANTIC Interview 226 - Bob Frankston, co-developer of Visicalc Altirra on a Mac - http://atariage.com/forums/topic/278822-altirra-30-mac-wine-port/ Possible side effects of listening to the Antic podcast include stuffy nose, sneezing, sore throat; drowsiness, dizziness, feeling nervous; mild nausea, upset stomach, constipation; increased appetite, weight changes; insomnia, decreased sex drive, impotence, or difficulty having an orgasm; dry mouth, intense hate of Commodore, and Amiga lust. Certain conditions apply. Offer good for those with approved credit. Member FDIC. An equal housing lender.

“When you see a door, you should get curious,” says Robert M. “Bob” Frankston, a computing pioneer who co-developed VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program with Dan Bricklin way back in 1979. We are discussing the engineering crisis and what should a young programmer do to stay relevant. “I hate the word coding; it’s like calling writing, typing.” As I sat with Bob for this episode of Outliers Podcast, we discussed everything from the future of computer programming to how algorithms and their masters such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are beginning to take control of our lives. “Algorithms are the new bureaucracy.”

Bob Frankston, co-developer of Visicalc Bob Frankston was co-developer of Visicalc, with Dan Bricklin, and co-founder of Software Arts, the company that first published Visicalc. Bob was also involved with the Atari 800 port of the program. If you're like to see our talking heads, a video version of this interview is available at the Internet Archive and YouTube, at the links below. This interview took place on August 22, 2016. "So we were really lucky there. But the important thing is to appreciate the luck factor ... A lot of people, especially in the .com boom days and everything, thought they were geniuses because the first thing they did worked. Well, no. They were lucky." Video of this interview at YouTube: https://youtu.be/X2ksQXoump4 Bob and Dan wrote about the history of Visicalc for Creative Computing magazine: http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n11/122_Visicalc79.php  Bob's web site: http://bob.ma/public/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc InfoWorld magazine article Inverse ATASCII podcast on VisiCalc: https://inverseatascii.info/2015/01/13/s1e8-visicalc/ Wikipedia on VisiCalc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc Wikipedia on Bob Frankston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Frankston

VisiCalc, released in 1982 by VisiCorp. Originally released in 1980 by Personal Software. It was written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston under Software Arts, Inc. This program for the Atari 8 bit line of computers was the first commercial spreadsheet for the Atari. There is a very interesting relationship with the company names, see the show links at the bottom of the supplement post for full details.

  This episode features VisiCalc, originally released in 1980 by Personal Software and later in 1982 released by VisiCorp.  It was written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston under Software Arts, Inc.  This program for the Atari 8 bit line of computers was the first commercial spreadsheet for the Atari.  There is a very interesting […]

For this week's Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] podcast, we are excited to have Bob Frankston back on the show. Frankston has spent a long time thinking about connectivity and we previously explored his thoughts on episode 14. In this episode, we talk a lot about how to think about what he terms “connectivity” rather than telecommunications. … Continue reading "Bob Frankston Returns to Community Broadband Bits Podcast – Episode 122" ★ Support this podcast ★

For those looking for our weekly podcast over the holiday break, we decided to recut one of our early interviews with Bob Frankston, a favorite of Lisa's, and put it back in the feed. We ran the original interview for episode 14 of our Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] podcast and again now for episode 78. Frankston … Continue reading "Bob Frankston Encore Interview – Community Broadband Bits Episode #78" ★ Support this podcast ★

Our fourteenth episode of Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] is an interview with Bob Frankston, who has made many important contributions to the development of both computers an telecommunications. His bio is here, but this is his present passion: My current interest is moving beyond the 19th century concept of telecom to community owned infrastructure. This would … Continue reading "Community Broadband Bits 14 – Bob Frankston" ★ Support this podcast ★

Mary Hodder and some others were in town David Weinberger invited some people over to his house to schmooze about saving the Internet and other topics. I walked around at one point and asked some of the people if they'd like to say something for a podcast. You'll hear Mary, Halley Suitt, Steve Garfield, Henry Jenkins, Rebecca McKinnon, Bob Frankston, and others. It's nearly a half hour long. Recorded: 2006-01-22 Length: 28:27, Size: 13.0MB