Podcast appearances and mentions of Dan Bricklin

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.  

Welcome to Hemispheric Views, Episode 001! Wait, no, that's wrong.. Episode 100!

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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 

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 644, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Fabrics And Textiles 1: Gauze is named for this Palestinian city where it's thought to have originated. Gaza. 2: In 552 Emperor Justinian sent 2 monks to China to discover the secret of this fabric. Silk. 3: The chief hair fiber used in textiles today comes from this kind of animal. Sheep. 4: A true Donegal type of this fabric will have flecks of many colors in the weave. Tweed. 5: Count Hilaire de Chardonnet is considered the father of this regenerated cellulose fiber. Rayon. Round 2. Category: Mountains 1: Air Force photos from 1949 show what some believe are the ruins of Noah's Ark on this Turkish mountain. Mount Ararat. 2: Though only 3 degrees south of the equator, this African mt.'s Kibu Peak is permanently covered in snow. Mount Kilamanjaro. 3: This Sicilian volcano has over 200 subsidiary cones. Etna. 4: This country's highest peak, Mount Elbrus, lies in the Caucasus Mountains on the Georgian border. Russia. 5: An Austrian and Italian portion of this system is called the Tyrol. the Alps. Round 3. Category: October Fest 1: This U.S. university was founded October 28, 1636. Harvard. 2: In late October 1922, he became premier of Italy. Benito Mussolini. 3: Martin Sheen played Bobby Kennedy in this 1974 TV movie about a crisis in Cuba. The Missiles of October. 4: This Middle Eastern president was assassinated while reviewing a military parade October 6, 1981. Anwar Sadat. 5: On October 21, 1520 this sailor entered the Chilean strait that today bears his name. Ferdinand Magellan. Round 4. Category: I Did It! 1: Florence Chadwick was the first woman to swim this in both directions; Gertrude Ederle swam it one way. the English Channel. 2: 13-year-old Rebecca Sealfon won it in 1997 by knowing euonym,E-U-O-N-Y-M. the National Spelling Bee. 3: Check it out! In 1972 he became the first American chess player to win the world championship. Bobby Fischer. 4: In 1957 this future astronaut set a speed record flying from L.A. to NYC in 3 hrs., 23 min., 8.4 sec.. John Glenn. 5: In 1884, the year of his death, he published the memoir "30 Years a Detective". (Allan) Pinkerton. Round 5. Category: The Computer Age 1: According to Moore's Law, named for a founder of Intel, these double in power roughly every 18 months. computer chips. 2: Dan Bricklin developed VISICALC, the first of these programs, similar to an accounting ledger. spreadsheet. 3: Coherent and Xenix are 2 of these, part of the abbreviation in the better-known MS-DOS. operating systems. 4: This programming language was named for calculating-machine inventor Blaise. PASCAL. 5: Among Internet users, the World Wide Web has surpassed the system named for this burrowing rodent. gopher. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcPeCes4w9Y https://history-computer.com/visicalc-of-dan-bricklin-and-bob-frankston-guide

This episode is part of a mini season of RadicalxChange(s) titled A New Era of Democracy.Rosa O'Hara moderates a discussion between Audrey Tang and Jo Guldi on Taiwan's expeditious response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the history of the g0v movement, the democratic power of embracing new forms of civic technology, and more.Audrey Tang (@audreyt) is Taiwan's Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation. She is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as for building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, she has served on the Taiwan National Development Council's open data and K-12 curriculum committees and has led the country's first e-Rulemaking project. In the private sector, Audrey has worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design. In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”Jo Guldi, PhD. (@joguldi) is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches courses on the history of Britain, the British Empire, modern development policy, and property law. She has published many articles about digital history methods, participatory mapping, and the history of eviction and rent control in Britain and its empire. She is a former Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History, Brown University. Her latest book The Long Land War is about the definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world. She lives in Richardson, Texas.Rosa O'Hara (@RosaO_Hara) is a staff writer for Noema Magazine. She previously worked had staff jobs editing for The Washington Post and HuffPost, was a contributing reporter for Newsday (NYC), and reported for The Jakarta Globe (Indonesia). She is based in Brooklyn, NY.CreditsOriginally produced by Paula Berman and Rachel Knoll for 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)This is a RadicalxChange Production.

About AnilAnil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly developer community where coders collaborate to create and share millions of web apps. He is a recognized advocate for more ethical tech through his work as an entrepreneur and writer. He serves as a board member for organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy and expression, Data & Society Research Institute, which researches the cutting edge of tech's impact on society, and The Markup, the nonprofit investigative newsroom that pushes for tech accountability. Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House's Office of Digital Strategy, served for a decade on the board of Stack Overflow, the world's largest community for coders, and today advises key startups and non-profits including the Lower East Side Girls Club, Medium, The Human Utility, DonorsChoose and Project Include.As a writer and artist, Dash has been a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, written for publications like The Atlantic and Businessweek, co-created one of the first implementations of the blockchain technology now known as NFTs, had his works exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborated with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists of 2018. Dash has also been a keynote speaker and guest in a broad range of media ranging from the Obama Foundation Summit to SXSW to Desus and Mero's late-night show.Links: Glitch: https://glitch.com Web.dev: https://web.dev Glitch Twitter: https://twitter.com/glitch Anil Dash Twitter: https://twitter.com/anildash TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's guest is a little bit off the beaten path from the cloud infrastructure types I generally drag, kicking and screaming, onto the show. If we take a look at the ecosystem and where it's going, it's clear that in the future, not everyone who wants to build a business, or a tool, or even an application is going to necessarily spring fully-formed into the world from the forehead of some God, knowing how to code. And oh, “I'm going to go to a boot camp for four months to learn how to do it first,” is increasingly untenable. I don't know if you would call it low-code or not. But that's how it feels. My guest today is Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch. Anil, thank you for joining me.Anil: Thanks so much for having me.Corey: So, let's get the important stuff out of the way first, since I have a long-standing history of mispronouncing the company Twitch as ‘Twetch,' I should probably do the same thing here. So, what is Gletch? And what does it do?Anil: Glitch is, at its simplest, a tool that lets you build a full-stack app in your web browser in about 30 seconds. And, you know, for your community, your audience, it's also this ability to create and deploy code instantly on a full-stack server with no concern for deploy, or DevOps, or provisioning a container, or any of those sort of concerns. And what it is for the users is, honestly, a community. They're like, “I looked at this app that was on Glitch; I thought it was cool; I could do what we call [remixing 00:02:03].” Which is to kind of fork that app, a running app, make a couple edits, and all of a sudden live at a real URL on the web, my app is running with exactly what I built. And that's something that has been—I think, just captured a lot of people's imagination to now where they've built over 12 or 15 million apps on the platform.Corey: You describe it somewhat differently than I would, and given that I tend to assume that people who create and run successful businesses don't generally tend to do it without thought, I'm not quite, I guess, insufferable enough to figure out, “Oh, well, I thought about this for ten seconds, therefore I've solved a business problem that you have been needling at for years.” But when I look at Glitch, I would describe it as something different than the way that you describe it. I would call it a web-based IDE for low-code applications and whatnot, and you never talk about it that way. Everything I can see there describes it talks about friendly creators, and community tied to it. Why is that?Anil: You're not wrong from the conventional technologist's point of view. I—sufficient vintage; I was coding in Visual Basic back in the '90s and if you squint, you can see that influence on Glitch today. And so I don't reject that description, but part of it is about the audience we're speaking to, which is sort of a next generation of creators. And I think importantly, that's not just age, right, but that could be demographic, that can be just sort of culturally, wherever you're at. And what we look at is who's making the most interesting stuff on the internet and in the industry, and they tend to be grounded in broader culture, whether they're on, you know, Instagram, or TikTok, or, you know, whatever kind of influencer, you want to point at—YouTube.And those folks, they think of themselves as creators first and they think of themselves as participating in the community first and then the tool sort of follow. And I think one of the things that's really striking is, if you look at—we'll take YouTube as an example because everyone's pretty familiar with it—they have a YouTube Creator Studio. And it is a very rich and deep tool. It does more than, you know, you would have had iMovie, or Final Cut Pro doing, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, incredibly advanced stuff. And those [unintelligible 00:04:07] use it every day, but nobody goes to YouTube and says, “This is a cloud-based nonlinear editor for video production, and we target cinematographers.” And if they did, they would actually narrow their audience and they would limit what their impact is on the world.And so similarly, I think we look at that for Glitch where the social object, the central thing that people organize around a Glitch is an app, not code. And that's this really kind of deep and profound idea, which is that everybody can understand an app. Everybody has an idea for an app. You know, even the person who's, “Ah, I'm not technical,” or, “I'm not really into technology,” they're like, “But you know what? If I could make an app, I would make this.”And so we think a lot about that creative impulse. And the funny thing is, that is a common thread between somebody that literally just got on the internet for the first time and somebody who has been doing cloud deploys for as long as there's been a cloud to deploy to, or somebody has been coding for decades. No matter who you are, you have that place that is starting from what's the experience I want to build, the app I want to build? And so I think that's where there's that framing. But it's also been really useful, in that if you're trying to make a better IDE in the cloud and a better text editor, and there are multiple trillion-dollar companies that [laugh] are creating products in that category, I don't think you're going to win. On the other hand, if you say, “This is more fun, and cooler, and has a better design, and feels better,” I think we could absolutely win in a walk away compared to trillion-dollar companies trying to be cool.Corey: I think that this is an area that has a few players in it could definitely stand to benefit by having more there. My big fear is not that AWS is going to launch stuff in your space and drive you out of business; I think that is a somewhat naive approach. I'm more concerned that they're going to try to launch something in your space, give it a dumb name, fail that market and appropriately, not understand who it's for and set the entire idea back five years. That is, in some cases, it seems like their modus operandi for an awful lot of new markets.Anil: Yeah, I mean, that's not an uncommon problem in any category that's sort of community driven. So, you know, back in the day, I worked on building blogging tools at the beginning of this, sort of, social media era, and we worried about that a lot. We had built some of the first early tools, Movable Type, and TypePad, and these were what were used to launch, like, Gawker and Huffington Post and all the, sort of, big early sites. And we had been doing it a couple years—and then at that time, major player—AOL came in, and they launched their own AOL blog service, and we were, you know, quaking in our boots. I remember just being kind of like, pit in your stomach, “Oh, my gosh. This is going to devastate the category.”And as it turns out, people were smart, and they have taste, and they can tell. And the domain that we're in is not one that is about raw computing power or raw resources that you can bring to bear so much as it is about can you get people to connect together, collaborate together, and feel like they're in a place where they want to make something and they want to share it with other people? And I mean, we've never done a single bit of advertising for Glitch. There's never been any paid acquisition. There's never done any of those things. And we go up against, broadly in the space, people that have billboards and they buy out all the ads of the airport and, you know, all the other kind of things we see—Corey: And they do the typical enterprise thing where they spend untold millions in acquiring the real estate to advertise on, and then about 50 cents on the message, from the looks of it. It's, wow, you go to all this trouble and expense to get something in front of me, and after all of that to get my attention, you don't have anything interesting to say?Anil: Right.Corey: [crosstalk 00:07:40] inverse of that.Anil: [crosstalk 00:07:41] it doesn't work.Corey: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's brand awareness. I love that game. Ugh.Anil: I was a CIO, and not once in my life did I ever make a purchasing decision based on who was sponsoring a golf tournament. It never happened, right? Like, I never made a call on a database platform because of a poster that was up at, you know, San Jose Airport. And so I think that's this thing that developers in particular, have really good BS filters, and you can sort of see through.Corey: What I have heard about the airport advertising space—and I but a humble cloud economist; I don't know if this is necessarily accurate or not—but if you have a company like Accenture, for example, that advertises on airport billboards, they don't even bother to list their website. If you go to their website, it turns out that there's no shopping cart function. I cannot add ‘one consulting' to my cart and make a purchase.Anil: “Ten pounds of consult, please.”Corey: Right? I feel like the primary purpose there might very well be that when someone presents to your board and says, “All right, we've had this conversation with Accenture.” The response is not, “Who?” It's a brand awareness play, on some level. That said, you say you don't do a bunch traditional advertising, but honestly, I feel like you advertise—more successfully—than I do at The Duckbill Group, just by virtue of having a personality running the company, in your case.Now, your platform is for the moment, slightly larger than mine, but that's okay,k I have ambition and a tenuous grasp of reality and I'm absolutely going to get there one of these days. But there is something to be said for someone who has a track record of doing interesting things and saying interesting things, pulling a, “This is what I do and this is how I do it.” It almost becomes a personality-led marketing effort to some degree, doesn't it?Anil: I'm a little mindful of that, right, where I think—so a little bit of context and history: Glitch as a company is actually 20 years old. The product is only a few years old, but we were formerly called Fog Creek Software, co-founded by Joel Spolsky who a lot of folks will know from back in the day as Joel on Software blog, was extremely influential. And that company, under leadership of Joel and his co-founder Michael Pryor spun out Stack Overflow, they spun out Trello. He had created, you know, countless products over the years so, like, their technical and business acumen is off the charts.And you know, I was on the board of Stack Overflow from, really, those first days and until just recently when they sold, and you know, you get this insight into not just how do you build a developer community that is incredibly valuable, but also has a place in the ecosystem that is unique and persists over time. And I think that's something that was very, very instructive. And so when it came in to lead Glitch I, we had already been a company with a, sort of, visible founder. Joel was as well known as a programmer as it got in the world?Corey: Oh, yes.Anil: And my public visibility is different, right? I, you know, I was a working coder for many years, but I don't think that's what people see me on social media has. And so I think, I've been very mindful where, like, I'm thrilled to use the platform I have to amplify what was created on a Glitch. But what I note is it's always, “This person made this thing. This person made this app and it had this impact, and it got these results, or made this difference for them.”And that's such a different thing than—I don't ever talk about, “We added syntax highlighting in the IDE and the editor in the browser.” It's just never it right. And I think there are people that—I love that work. I mean, I love having that conversation with our team, but I think that's sort of the difference is my enthusiasm is, like, people are making stuff and it's cool. And that sort of is my lens on the whole world.You know, somebody makes whatever a great song, a great film, like, these are all things that are exciting. And the Glitch community's creations sort of feel that way. And also, we have other visible people on the team. I think of our sort of Head of Community, Jenn Schiffer, who's a very well known developer and her right. And you know, tons of people have read her writing and seen her talks over the years.And she and I talk about this stuff; I think she sort of feels the same way, which is, she's like, “If I were, you know, being hired by some cloud platform to show the latest primitives that they've deployed behind an API,” she's like, “I'd be miserable. Like, I don't want to do that in the world.” And I sort of feel the same way. But if you say, “This person who never imagined they would make an app that would have this kind of impact.” And they're going to, I think of just, like, the last couple of weeks, some of the apps we've seen where people are—it could be [unintelligible 00:11:53]. It could be like, “We made a Slack bot that finally gets this reporting into the right channel [laugh] inside our company, but it was easy enough that I could do it myself without asking somebody to create it even though I'm not technically an engineer.” Like, that's incredible.The other extreme, we have people that are PhDs working on machine learning that are like, “At the end of the day, I don't want to be responsible for managing and deploying. [laugh]. I go home, and so the fact that I can do this in create is really great.” I think that energy, I mean, I feel the same way. I still build stuff all the time, and I think that's something where, like, you can't fake that and also, it's bigger than any one person or one public persona or social media profile, or whatever. I think there's this bigger idea. And I mean, to that point, there are millions of developers on Glitch and they've created well over ten million apps. I am not a humble person, but very clearly, that's not me, you know? [laugh].Corey: I have the same challenge to it's, effectively, I have now a 12 employee company and about that again contractors for various specialized functions, and the common perception, I think, is that mostly I do all the stuff that we talk about in public, and the other 11 folks sort of sit around and clap as I do it. Yeah, that is only four of those people's jobs as it turns out. There are more people doing work here. It's challenging, on some level, to get away from the myth of the founder who is the person who has the grand vision and does all the work and sees all these things.Anil: This industry loves the myth of the great man, or the solo legend, or the person in their bedroom is a genius, the lone genius, and it's a lie. It's a lie every time. And I think one of the things that we can do, especially in the work at Glitch, but I think just in my work overall with my whole career is to dismantle that myth. I think that would be incredibly valuable. It just would do a service for everybody.But I mean, that's why Glitch is the way it is. It's a collaboration platform. Our reference points are, you know, we look at Visual Studio and what have you, but we also look at Google Docs. Why is it that people love to just send a link to somebody and say, “Let's edit this thing together and knock out a, you know, a memo together or whatever.” I think that idea we're going to collaborate together, you know, we saw that—like, I think of Figma, which is a tool that I love. You know, I knew Dylan when he was a teenager and watching him build that company has been so inspiring, not least because design was always supposed to be collaborative.And then you think about we're all collaborating together in design every day. We're all collaborating together and writing in Google Docs—or whatever we use—every day. And then coding is still this kind of single-player game. Maybe at best, you throw something over the wall with a pull request, but for the most part, it doesn't feel like you're in there with somebody. Certainly doesn't feel like you're creating together in the same way that when you're jamming on these other creative tools does. And so I think that's what's been liberating for a lot of people is to feel like it's nice to have company when you're making something.Corey: Periodically, I'll talk to people in the AWS ecosystem who for some reason appear to believe that Jeff Barr builds a lot of these services himself then writes blog posts about them. And it's, Amazon does not break out how many of its 1.2 million or so employees work at AWS, but I'm guessing it's more than five people. So yeah, Jeff probably only wrote a dozen of those services himself; the rest are—Anil: That's right. Yeah.Corey: —done by service teams and the rest. It's easy to condense this stuff and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. To my mind, a big company is one that has 200 people in it. That is not apparently something the world agrees with.Anil: Yeah, it's impossible to fathom an organization of hundreds of thousands or a million-plus people, right? Like, our brains just aren't wired to do it. And I think so we reduce things to any given Jeff, whether that's Barr or Bezos, whoever you want to point to.Corey: At one point, I think they had something like more men named Jeff on their board than they did women, which—Anil: Yeah. Mm-hm.Corey: —all right, cool. They've fixed that and now they have a Dave problem.Anil: Yeah [unintelligible 00:15:37] say that my entire career has been trying to weave out of that dynamic, whether it was a Dave, a Mike, or a Jeff. But I think that broader sort of challenge is this—that is related to the idea of there being this lone genius. And I think if we can sort of say, well, creation always happens in community. It always happens influenced by other things. It is always—I mean, this is why we talk about it in Glitch.When you make an app, you don't start from a blank slate, you start from a working app that's already on the platform and you're remix it. And there was a little bit of a ego resistance by some devs years ago when they first encountered that because [unintelligible 00:16:14] like, “No, no, no, I need a blank page, you know, because I have this brilliant idea that nobody's ever thought of before.” And I'm like, “You know, the odds are you'll probably start from something pretty close to something that's built before.” And that enabler of, “There's nothing new under the sun, and you're probably remixing somebody else's thoughts,” I think that sort of changed the tenor of the community. And I think that's something where like, I just see that across the industry.When people are open, collaborative, like even today, a great example is web browsers. The folks making web browsers at Google, Apple, Mozilla are pretty collaborative. They actually do share ideas together. I mean, I get a window into that because they actually all use Glitch to do test cases on different bugs and stuff for them, but you see, one Glitch project will add in folks from Mozilla and folks from Apple and folks from the Chrome team and Google, and they're like working together and you're, like—you kind of let down the pretense of there being this secret genius that's only in this one organization, this one group of people, and you're able to make something great, and the web is greater than all of them. And the proof, you know, for us is that Glitch is not a new idea. Heroku wanted to do what we're doing, you know, a dozen years ago.Corey: Yeah, everyone wants to build Heroku except the company that acquired Heroku, and here we are. And now it's—I was waiting for the next step and it just seemed like it never happened.Anil: But you know when I talked to those folks, they were like, “Well, we didn't have Docker, and we didn't have containerization, and on the client side, we didn't have modern browsers that could do this kind of editing experience, all this kind of thing.” So, they let their editor go by the wayside and became mostly deploy platform. And—but people forget, for the first year or two Heroku had an in-browser editor, and an IDE and, you know, was constrained by the tech at the time. And I think that's something where I'm like, we look at that history, we look at, also, like I said, these browser manufacturers working together were able to get us to a point where we can make something better.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I do have a question for you about the nuts and bolts behind the scenes of Glitch and how it works. If I want to remix something on Glitch, I click the button, a couple seconds later it's there and ready for me to start kicking the tires on, which tells me a few things. One, it is certainly not using CloudFormation to provision it because I didn't have time to go and grab a quick snack and take a six hour nap. So, it apparently is running on computers somewhere. I have it on good authority that this is not just run by people who are very fast at assembling packets by hand. What does the infrastructure look like?Anil: It's on AWS. Our first year-plus of prototyping while we were sort of in beta and early stages of Glitch was getting that time to remix to be acceptable. We still wish it were faster; I mean, that's always the way but, you know, when we started, it was like, yeah, you did sit there for a minute and watch your cursor spin. I mean, what's happening behind the scenes, we're provisioning a new container, standing up a full stack, bringing over the code from the Git repo on the previous project, like, we're doing a lot of work, lift behind the scenes, and we went through every possible permutation of what could make that experience be good enough. So, when we start talking about prototyping, we're at five-plus, almost six years ago when we started building the early versions of what became Glitch, and at that time, we were fairly far along in maturity with Docker, but there was not a clear answer about the use case that we're building for.So, we experimented with Docker Swarm. We went pretty far down that road; we spent a good bit of time there, it failed in ways that were both painful and slow to fix. So, that was great. I don't recommend that. In fairness, we have a very unusual use case, right? So, Glitch now, if you talk about ten million containers on Glitch, no two of those apps are the same and nobody builds an orchestration infrastructure assuming that every single machine is a unique snowflake.Corey: Yeah, massively multi-tenant is not really a thing that people know.Anil: No. And also from a security posture Glitch—if you look at it as a security expert—it is a platform allowing anonymous users to execute arbitrary code at scale. That's what we do. That's our job. And so [laugh], you know, so your threat model is very different. It's very different.I mean, literally, like, you can go to Glitch and build an app, running a full-stack app, without even logging in. And the reason we enable that is because we see kids in classrooms, they're learning to code for the first time, they want to be able to remix a project and they don't even have an email address. And so that was about enabling something different, right? And then, similarly, you know, we explored Kubernetes—because of course you do; it's the default choice here—and some of the optimizations, again, if you go back several years ago, being able to suspend a project and then quickly sort of rehydrate it off disk into a running app was not a common use case, and so it was not optimized. And so we couldn't offer that experience because what we do with Glitch is, if you haven't used an app in five minutes, and you're not a paid member, who put that app to sleep. And that's just a reasonable—Corey: Uh, “Put the app to sleep,” as in toddler, or, “Put the app to sleep,” as an ill puppy.Anil: [laugh]. Hopefully, the former, but when we were at our worst and scaling the ladder. But that is that thing; it's like we had that moment that everybody does, which is that, “Oh, no. This worked.” That was a really scary moment where we started seeing app creation ramping up, and number of edits that people were making in those apps, you know, ramping up, which meant deploys for us ramping up because we automatically deploy as you edit on Glitch. And so, you know, we had that moment where just—well, as a startup, you always hope things go up into the right, and then they do and then you're not sleeping for a long time. And we've been able to get it back under control.Corey: Like, “Oh, no, I'm not succeeding.” Followed immediately by, “Oh, no, I'm succeeding.” And it's a good problem to have.Anil: Exactly. Right, right, right. The only thing worse than failing is succeeding sometimes, in terms of stress levels. And organizationally, you go through so much; technically, you go through so much. You know, we were very fortunate to have such thoughtful technical staff to navigate these things.But it was not obvious, and it was not a sort of this is what you do off the shelf. And our architecture was very different because people had looked at—like, I look at one of our inspirations was CodePen, which is a great platform and the community love them. And their front end developers are, you know, always showing off, “Here's this cool CSS thing I figured out, and it's there.” But for the most part, they're publishing static content, so architecturally, they look almost more like a content management system than an app-running platform. And so we couldn't learn anything from them about our scaling our architecture.We could learn from them on community, and they've been an inspiration there, but I think that's been very, very different. And then, conversely, if we looked at the Herokus of the world, or all those sort of easy deploy, I think Amazon has half a dozen different, like, “This will be easier,” kind of deploy tools. And we looked at those, and they were code-centric not app-centric. And that led to fundamentally different assumptions in user experience and optimization.And so, you know, we had to chart our own path and I think it was really only the last year or so that we were able to sort of turn the corner and have high degree of confidence about, we know what people build on Glitch and we know how to support and scale it. And that unlocked this, sort of, wave of creativity where there are things that people want to create on the internet but it had become too hard to do so. And the canonical example I think I was—those of us are old enough to remember FTPing up a website—Corey: Oh, yes.Anil: —right—to Geocities, or whatever your shared web host was, we remember how easy that was and how much creativity was enabled by that.Corey: Yes, “How easy it was,” quote-unquote, for those of us who spent years trying to figure out passive versus active versus ‘what is going on?' As far as FTP transfers. And it turns out that we found ways to solve for that, mostly, but it became something a bit different and a bit weird. But here we are.Anil: Yeah, there was definitely an adjustment period, but at some point, if you'd made an HTML page in notepad on your computer, and you could, you know, hurl it at a server somewhere, it would kind of run. And when you realize, you look at the coding boot camps, or even just to, like, teach kids to code efforts, and they're like, “Day three. Now, you've gotten VS Code and GitHub configured. We can start to make something.” And you're like, “The whole magic of this thing getting it to light up. You put it in your web browser, you're like, ‘That's me. I made this.'” you know, north star for us was almost, like, you go from zero to hello world in a minute. That's huge.Corey: I started participating one of those boot camps a while back to help. Like, the first thing I changed about the curriculum was, “Yeah, we're not spending time teaching people how to use VI in, at that point, the 2010s.” It was, that was a fun bit of hazing for those of us who were becoming Unix admins and knew that wherever we'd go, we'd find VI on a server, but here in the real world, there are better options for that.Anil: This is rank cruelty.Corey: Yeah, I mean, I still use it because 20 years of muscle memory doesn't go away overnight, but I don't inflict that on others.Anil: Yeah. Well, we saw the contrast. Like, we worked with, there's a group called Mouse here in New York City that creates the computer science curriculum for the public schools in the City of New York. And there's a million kids in public school in New York City, right, and they all go through at least some of this CS education. [unintelligible 00:24:49] saw a lot of work, a lot of folks in the tech community here did. It was fantastic.And yet they were still doing this sort of very conceptual, theoretical. Here's how a professional developer would set up their environment. Quote-unquote, “Professional.” And I'm like, you know what really sparks kids' interests? If you tell them, “You can make a page and it'll be live and you can send it to your friend. And you can do it right now.”And once you've sparked that creative impulse, you can't stop them from doing the rest. And I think what was wild was kids followed down that path. Some of the more advanced kids got to high school and realized they want to experiment with, like, AI and ML, right? And they started playing with TensorFlow. And, you know, there's collaboration features in Glitch where you can do real-time editing and a code with this. And they went in the forum and they were asking questions, that kind of stuff. And the people answering their questions were the TensorFlow team at Google. [laugh]. Right?Corey: I remember those days back when everything seemed smaller and more compact, [unintelligible 00:25:42] but almost felt like a balkanization of community—Anil: Yeah.Corey: —where now it's oh, have you joined that Slack team, and I'm looking at this and my machine is screaming for more RAM. It's, like, well, it has 128 gigs in it. Shouldn't that be enough? Not for Slack.Anil: Not for chat. No, no, no. Chat is demanding.Corey: Oh, yeah, that and Chrome are basically trying to out-ram each other. But if you remember the days of volunteering as network staff on Freenode when you could basically gather everyone for a given project in the entire stack on the same IRC network. And that doesn't happen anymore.Anil: And there's something magic about that, right? It's like now the conversations are closed off in a Slack or Discord or what have you, but to have a sort of open forum where people can talk about this stuff, what's wild about that is, for a beginner, a teenage creator who's learning this stuff, the idea that the people who made the AI, I can talk to, they're alive still, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, they're not even that old. But [laugh]. They think of this is something that's been carved in stone for 100 years.And so it's so inspiring to them. And then conversely, talking to the TensorFlow team, they made these JavaScript examples, like, tensorflow.js was so accessible, you know? And they're like, “This is the most heartwarming thing. Like, we think about all these enterprise use cases or whatever. But like, kids wanting to make stuff, like recognize their friends' photo, and all the vision stuff they're doing around [unintelligible 00:26:54] out there,” like, “We didn't know this is why we do it until we saw this is why we do it.”And that part about connecting the creative impulse from both, like, the most experienced, advanced coders at the most august tech companies that exist, as well as the most rank beginners in public schools, who might not even have a computer at home, saying that's there—if you put those two things together, and both of those are saying, “I'm a coder; I'm able to create; I can make something on the internet, and I can share it with somebody and be inspired by it,” like, that is… that's as good as it gets.Corey: There's something magic in being able to reach out to people who built this stuff. And honestly—you shouldn't feel this way, but you do—when I was talking to the folks who wrote the things I was working on, it really inspires you to ask better questions. Like when I'm talking to Dr. Venema, the author of Postfix and I'm trying to figure out how this thing works, well, I know for a fact that I will not be smarter than he is at basically anything in that entire universe, and maybe most beyond that, as well, however, I still want to ask a question in such a way that doesn't make me sound like a colossal dumbass. So, it really inspires you—Anil: It motivates you.Corey: Oh, yeah. It inspires you to raise your question bar up a bit, of, “I am trying to do x. I expect y to happen. Instead, z is happening as opposed to what I find the documentation that”—oh, as I read the documentation, discover exactly what I messed up, and then I delete the whole email. It's amazing how many of those things you never send because when constructing a question the right way, you can help yourself.Anil: Rubber ducking against your heroes.Corey: Exactly.Anil: I mean, early in my career, I'd gone through sort of licensing mishap on a project that later became open-source, and sort of stepped it in and as you do, and unprompted, I got an advice email from Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet, he invented VisiCalc, and he had advice and he was right. And it was… it was unreal. I was like, this guy's one of my heroes. I grew up reading about his work, and not only is he, like, a living, breathing person, he's somebody that can have the kindness to reach out and say, “Yeah, you know, have you tried this? This might work.”And it's, this isn't, like, a guy who made an app. This is the guy who made the app for which the phrase killer app was invented, right? And, you know, we've since become friends and I think a lot of his inspiration and his work. And I think it's one of the things it's like, again, if you tell somebody starting out, the people who invented the fundamental tools of the digital era, are still active, still building stuff, still have advice to share, and you can connect with them, it feels like a cheat code. It feels like a superpower, right? It feels like this impossible thing.And I think about like, even for me, the early days of the web, view source, which is still buried in our browser somewhere. And you can see the code that makes the page, it felt like getting away with something. “You mean, I can just look under the hood and see how they made this page and then I can do it too?” I think we forget how radical that is—[unintelligible 00:29:48] radical open-source in general is—and you see it when, like, you talk to young creators. I think—you know, I mean, Glitch obviously is used every day by, like, people at Microsoft and Google and the New York Timesor whatever, like, you know, the most down-the-road, enterprise developers, but I think a lot about the new creators and the people who are learning, and what they tell me a lot is the, like, “Oh, so I made this app, but what do I have to do to put it on the internet?”I'm like, “It already is.” Like, as soon as you create it, that URL was live, it all works. And their, like, “But isn't there, like, an app store I have to ask? Isn't there somebody I have to get permission to publish this from? Doesn't somebody have to approve it?”And you realize they've grown up with whether it was the app stores on their phones, or the cartridges in their Nintendo or, you know, whatever it was, they had always had this constraint on technology. It wasn't something you make; it's something that is given to you, you know, handed down from on high. And I think that's the part that animates me and the whole team, the community, is this idea of, like, I geek out about our infrastructure. I love that we're doing deploys constantly, so fast, all the time, and I love that we've taken the complexity away, but the end of the day, the reason why we do it, is you can have somebody just sort of saying, I didn't realize there was a place I could just make something put it in front of, maybe, millions of people all over the world and I don't have to ask anybody permission and my idea can matter as much as the thing that's made by the trillion-dollar company.Corey: It's really neat to see, I guess, the sense of spirit and soul that arises from a smaller, more, shall we say, soulful company. No disparagement meant toward my friends at AWS and other places. It's just, there's something that you lose when you get to a certain point of scale. Like, I don't ever have to have a meeting internally and discuss things, like, “Well, does this thing that we're toying with doing violate antitrust law?” That is never been on my roadmap of things I have to even give the slightest crap about.Anil: Right, right? You know, “What does the investor relations person at a retirement fund think about the feature that we shipped?” Is not a question that we have to answer. There's this joy in also having community that sort of has come along with us, right? So, we talk a lot internally about, like, how do we make sure Glitch stays weird? And, you know, the community sort of supports that.Like, there's no reason logically that our logo should be the emoji of two fish. But that kind of stuff of just, like, it just is. We don't question it anymore. I think that we're very lucky. But also that we are part of an ecosystem. I also am very grateful where, like… yeah, that folks at Google use Glitch as part of their daily work when they're explaining a new feature in Chrome.Like, if you go to web.dev and their dev portal teaches devs how to code, all the embedded examples go to these Glitch apps that are running, showing running code is incredible. When we see the Stripe team building examples of, like, “Do you want to use this new payment API that we made? Well, we have a Glitch for you.” And literally every day, they ship one that sort of goes and says, “Well, if you just want to use this new Stripe feature, you just remix this thing and it's instantly running on Glitch.”I mean, those things are incredible. So like, I'm very grateful that the biggest companies and most influential companies in the industry have embraced it. So, I don't—yeah, I don't disparage them at all, but I think that ability to connect to the person who'd be like, “I just want to do payments. I've never heard of Stripe.”Corey: Oh yeah.Anil: And we have this every day. They come into Glitch, and they're just like, I just wanted to take credit cards. I didn't know there's a tool to do that.Corey: “I was going to build it myself,” and everyone shrieks, “No, no. Don't do that. My God.” Yeah. Use one of their competitors, fine,k but building it yourself is something a lunatic would do.Anil: Exactly. Right, right. And I think we forget that there's only so much attention people can pay, there's only so much knowledge they have.Corey: Everything we say is new to someone. That's why I always go back to assuming no one's ever heard of me, and explain the basics of what I do and how I do it, periodically. It's, no one has done all the mandatory reading. Who knew?Anil: And it's such a healthy exercise to, right, because I think we always have that kind of beginner's mindset about what Glitch is. And in fairness, I understand why. Like, there have been very experienced developers that have said, “Well, Glitch looks too colorful. It looks like a toy.” And that we made a very intentional choice at masking—like, we're doing the work under the hood.And you can drop down into a terminal and you can do—you can run whatever build script you want. You can do all that stuff on Glitch, but that's not what we put up front and I think that's this philosophy about the role of the technology versus the people in the ecosystem.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to, I guess, explain what Glitch is and how you view it. If people want to learn more about it, about your opinions, et cetera. Where can they find you?Anil: Sure. glitch.com is easiest place, and hopefully that's a something you can go and a minute later, you'll have a new app that you built that you want to share. And, you know, we're pretty active on all social media, you know, Twitter especially with Glitch: @glitch. I'm on as @anildash.And one of the things I love is I get to talk to folks like you and learn from the community, and as often as not, that's where most of the inspiration comes from is just sort of being out in all the various channels, talking to people. It's wild to be 20-plus years into this and still never get tired of that.Corey: It's why I love this podcast. Every time I talk to someone, I learn something new. It's hard to remain too ignorant after you have enough people who've shared wisdom with you as long as you can retain it.Anil: That's right.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.Anil: So, glad to be here.Corey: Anil Dash, CEO of Gletch—or Glitch as he insists on calling it. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment telling me how your small team at AWS is going to crush Glitch into the dirt just as soon as they find a name that's dumb enough for the service.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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. 

Welcome back to Series 2 of the Danielle Newnham Podcast. I am your host – Danielle Newnham and each week, I interview tech founders and innovators to learn the inspiring, human, stories behind the game-changing tech we use every day.Today, I am thrilled to kick off Series 2 with Dan Bricklin – the man behind the very first electronic spreadsheet.Dan received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the MIT before coming up with the idea for VisiCalc whilst studying Business at Harvard Business School. Not only did VisiCalc form the basis of what we all know to be the spreadsheet today but at the time, Steve Jobs credited VisiCalc with helping drive Apple II’s success. In this episode, we explore Dan’s background, what got him excited about engineering as a kid and what it was like studying at MIT at the dawn of such an exciting age.We also discuss the motivation behind creating VisiCalc and what it felt like to have someone so close to him essentially copy it – you’ll be surprised to hear there were no hard feelings!Dan’s work has been critical to the innovation which followed and I am grateful that he shared his story with me.I hope you enjoy it too.------Let us know what you think of this episode and please rate, review and share - it means the world to me and helps others to find it too.------Danielle on Twitter @daniellenewnham and  Instagram @daniellenewnhamDan Bricklin on Twitter @danb / website / buy his book here.-----This episode was hosted by me - Danielle Newnham, a recovering founder, author and writer who has been interviewing tech founders and innovators for ten years - and produced by Jolin Cheng. 

And we're back! Great to have you here for more interviews with the tech founders and innovators behind the game-changing tech we use every day.Listen in to hear who we have coming up on this Series as well as why the telling of these stories is so important.This Series is hosted by Danielle Newnham and produced by Jolin Cheng.If you would like to sponsor this or another Series, please get in touch with Danielle Newnham via Twitter or LinkedIn.

According to the legend, the cup holding the wine Jesus toasted his friends with at his Last Supper the next day held some of his blood from the crucifixion. Joseph of Arimethea had possession of that cup and wound up in Britain. Whereupon it was "lost." In 1182 a poem was circulated with the story of the Holy Grail. It was bound up with the Arthur legends and then was found in a Monty Python video and later the prize of Indiana Jones (and the Last Crusade). In 1979, Dan Bricklin connected a spreadsheet for the new personal computer product, and the pursuit of the Holy Grail was transformed in the computer age to the pursuit of the killer app. We still live in the age of the pursuit of the killer app. IT companies with their IoT and Edge compute married to predictive analytics thought they found that Killer App in predictive maintenance. I think that stopping with predictive maintenance as THE app is far too shortsighted. There is far more to be gained by combining with more applications that will help make manufacturing more profitable for the enterprise.

David and Christopher start the show by discussing a technology that drove decades of innovation: the spreadsheet. Dan Bricklin, creator of VisiCalc - the Lotus and Excel predecessor that was so successful people bought Apple computers just to use it - joins to talk about why number-crunching was such a killer app. Then WSJ reporter Julia Carpenter comes on to talk about family cellphone plans - how they came to be the most popular plans, and why even non-families use them. Finally, David interviews Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, about whether your data is secure (probably not) and what you can do about it (plenty).

“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.”

Il souvenir digitale che ti porto oggi è un TED Talk dell'uomo che ha inventato i fogli di calcolo: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_bricklin_meet_the_inventor_of_the_electronic_spreadsheet Si chiama Dan Bricklin e da lui possiamo imparare alcune strategie per essere innovatori e costruire il nostro successo professionale.☞ DIVENTA PRODUTTORE DEL PODCAST > http://youmediaweb.com/finanzia☞ SCRIVI UNA RECENSIONE > http://youmediaweb.com/recensioni

Il souvenir digitale che ti porto oggi è un TED Talk dell'uomo che ha inventato i fogli di calcolo: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_bricklin_meet_the_inventor_of_the_electronic_spreadsheet Si chiama Dan Bricklin e da lui possiamo imparare alcune strategie per essere innovatori e costruire il nostro successo professionale.☞ DIVENTA PRODUTTORE DEL PODCAST > http://youmediaweb.com/finanzia☞ SCRIVI UNA RECENSIONE > http://youmediaweb.com/recensioni

Dan Bricklin changed the world forever when he codeveloped VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet and grandfather of programs you probably use every day like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. Join the software engineer and computing legend as he explores the tangled web of first jobs, daydreams and homework problems that led to his transformational invention. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan Bricklin changed the world forever when he codeveloped VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet and grandfather of programs you probably use every day like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. Join the software engineer and computing legend as he explores the tangled web of first jobs, daydreams and homework problems that led to his transformational invention.

Dan Bricklin a transformé le monde définitivement lorsqu'il a co-développé VisiCalc, la première feuille de calcul électronique. Il est aussi le grand-père des programmes que nous utilisons quotidiennement, Microsoft Excel ou Google Sheets. Le récit de cet ingénieur en informatique, une légende, nous entraîne à la découverte du réseau confus des premiers boulots, des rêves éveillés et des devoirs de math qui l'ont conduit à créer cette invention géniale.

Dan Bricklin mudou o mundo para sempre, quando participou do desenvolvimento do VisiCalc, a primeira planilha eletrônica e avó de programas que você provavelmente usa todos os dias, como o Microsoft Excel e o Google Sheets. Junte-se a esse engenheiro de software e lenda da computação enquanto ele explora o emaranhado de primeiros empregos, devaneios e tarefas de casa que levaram a essa invenção transformadora.

Dan Bricklin cambió el mundo para siempre cuando desarrolló VisiCalc, la primera hoja de cálculo electrónica y programas clásicos que quizá uses a diario como Microsoft Excel y Google Sheets. Comprueba de la mano de este ingeniero de software y leyenda de la computación el camino de la intrincada red de sus primeros trabajos, sus sueños y las tareas para el hogar que dieron origen a su invención transformacional.

댄 브릭클린은 비지캘크(VisiCalc)를 개발하여 세상을 바꾸었습니다. 비지캘크는우리가 매일 사용하고 있는 마이크로소프트 엑셀이나 구글 스프레드시트같은 프로그램의 시초인 최초의 전자 스프레드시트입니다. 소프트웨어 엔지니어이자 컴퓨터 프로그램의 전설인 그와 함께 그가 첫 직업을 갖게 된 복잡한 과정, 그의 상상과 과제, 그리고 그 결과를 발명으로 연결한 과정을 들어보세요.

Dan Bricklin änderte die Welt für immer, als er VisiCalc, die erste elektronische Tabellenkalkulation und Mutter von Programmen, mitentwickelte, die Sie vermutlich täglich benutzen, wie z. B. Microsoft Excel und Google Sheets. Lauschen Sie Computerlegende und Softwareentwickler Dan Bricklin, wenn er das verwobene Netz aus ersten Jobs, Tagträumen und Problemen bei Hausaufgaben erkundet, die zu seiner bahnbrechenden Erfindung geführt haben.

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 […]

In this episode of This Developer's Life we ask the hard questions about space. Why aren't we on Mars? Why haven't we gone back to the moon? We talk to Paul Lutus, Dan Bricklin, Tamar Cohen, and hear from Ray Bradbury.Download Here

Scott sits down with Computing Pioneer and VisiCalc developer Dan Bricklin. Dan also wrote the popular iPad application Note Taker HD and has recently joined Alpha Corporation as their CTO. Dan and Scott chat about Douglas Engelbart, the invention of the mouse, and the myriad of computing innovations that we've enjoyed since the 60s.

Daniel Bricklin, a software designer, is best known as the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. In addition to the spreadsheet, he helped develop one of the first word processing systems in the mid-1970's, programmed the most popular prototyping tool of the MSDOS world, helped introduce the world to the capabilities of electronic ink on pen computers, and brought new types of easy web site authoring to regular people. His products have proven to be catalysts that had major impacts on the growth of the computer industry. The original live interview was on 5.19.09 and hosted by Chicke Fitzgerald, CEO-Solutionz Dan's website is http://www.bricklin.com/

Dan Bricklin is an innovator and entrepreneur, and created VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet in 1979. He's just written a book called Bricklin on Technology full of observations, stories, case histories and insight into the human aspect of technology.

Bricklin, McBride, Fogg, Skillings - Hosted by Chicke Fitzgerald, CEO Solutionz Media 1000am Innovation with Dan Bricklin 1030am Leadership with Jon McBride 1100am Growth with John Fogg 1030am Corporate Escape Artists with Pamela Skillings, author of Escape from Corporate America

When he was inaugurated, President Obama called for transparency, participation, and collaboration with an eye towards a duty of responsibility to more than just ourselves as we build a foundation for growth that is inclusive. This is a recording of a Mass Technology Leadership Council meeting where this was discussed by a panel and other participants. The panelists were Doc Searls, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and now at Harvard's Berkman Center and senior editor for Linux Journal, as well as Susie Adams, Microsoft Federal Civilian and IGO Chief Technology Officer, Tim Yeaton, the new CEO of Black Duck Software who has a background that includes Red Hat and Macromedia, and Tom Kincaid, Executive Director of Sun's Application Platform organization and part of the original Java EE architecture and management teams. Dan Bricklin moderated. Recorded: April 1, 2009 Length: 1:58:57, Size: 54.4MB

  A show on a calculator?  Yep, it all adds up.Welcome to Show 070!  This week's Topic: The HP-41C Programmable Scientific Calculator! Topics and links discussed in the podcast... What's Dan Bricklin, creator of VisiCalc, up to these days?  Find out in an online interview at LowEndMac.com!Check out the HP41 page on The Museum of HP Calculators for a good write-up on the 41!The HP41.org site has emulators, software, manuals and more! HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND A FANTASTIC NEW YEAR!  See you in 2007! Be sure to send any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com. For online discussions on Retrobits Podcast topics, check out the Retrobits Podcast forum on the PETSCII Forums page! Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan. Thanks for listening! - Earl  

  VisiCalc was great!  That sums it up. Welcome to Show 022!  This week's topic: VisiCalc - The Killer Application Topics and links discussed in the podcast... An Atari 800 laptop?  Believe it!  Brought to you by the hardware genius of Benjamin Heckendorn. Check out Dan Bricklin's own web site, with info on VisiCalc, and a host of other information! Thanks to NerdTV for interviewing Dan Bricklin, and for making their show available under a Creative Commons license. Be sure to send any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com. For online discussions on Retrobits Podcast topics, check out the Retrobits Podcast forum on the PETSCII Forums page! Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan. Thanks for listening! - Earl