Before Microsoft's Excel came about, a Harvard MBA student and his former MIT classmate built the first spreadsheet software for the Apple II.
It was 1979 and Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wanted to see their calculators come to life. They wanted to be able to change numbers in their calculations and update their final answers. By creating VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, that's exactly what they did.
Bricklin and Frankston would work at night because computer time was cheaper at night. They thought of it as a "visual calculator" and that is why they gave it the name VisiCalc. VisiCalc was such a crucial component of the Apple II that according to Frankston, "when Apple was going to go public, they couldn't go public until I found the last bug in the Apple II VisiCalc."
EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published on April 14, 2015
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