Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/17
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Jim Brick wrote: > > VisiCalc ? > No, VisiCalc was the original spreadsheet. Just for the record, Bill's program was called MultiPlan. It was part of a series of programs (sort of an early version of Office if you will.) It was ported to many different platforms including the Commodore 64. The law was murky; at the time, the idea of software patents was not proven, and the creators of VisiCalc looked into it and were told that getting a patent would not be possible, so they did not pursue. I -believe- that the guy who came up with VisiCalc was Dan Bricklin; it was marketed by a guy named Fylstra. Dan thought up the idea and coded it rather quickly while doing his (I think MBA) studies at Harvard. Two bright guys whose ideas repaid them: Bob Metcalf, who wrote up a plan for what became Ethernet as part of his theses; John Warnock, who took the typesetting language he came up with at Xerox PARC and turned it into PostScript (and co-founded Adobe along the way of course). Also Bill Joy (Sun Micro guru) whose work was based on his BSD stuff, and Vint Cerf, who worked on the early days of the Internet (MCI hired him for a great deal of money, I am certain. > >I find it interesting to note, especially on a list were the topic of > >companies stealing designs is frequently discussed, that Bill Gates > >launched his company with a "killer app" that was stolen from a Harvard > >professor who didn't copyright it. The killer app was a spreadsheet, whose > >name escapes me at the moment. > >-- > >Michael Garmisa <elmar@nyct.net> > >NO ARCHIVE > > Cordially ./patrick