Talk:VisiCalc/Archives/2013

"... and in time ..."?
What does "and in time the copyright" mean? Is this a particular use of US English with which I am unfamiliar, or an error? --Anonymous


 * It does seem OK to use this phrase in US English, yes. AFAIK, it means roughly the same as "... with the passage of time ...", or, "... eventually ...". --Wernher 20:49, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Ray Ozzie's role?
"Ozzie was instrumental in the development of Lotus Symphony and Software Arts Inc.’s TK!Solver and VisiCalc..." -from his bio at Microsoft. Instrumental how? --Snori 00:30, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Factual accuracy
The factual accuracy of part of the article is disputed. The article states:
 * "Though the electronic spreadsheet was a revolutionary idea, Bricklin was advised that he would be unlikely to be granted a patent, so he failed to profit significantly from his invention. At the time [presumably in 1979], patent law had not been successfully applied to software."

The content of the article software patent (see section: Early example of a software patent) contradicts this last sentence, pointing to software patents granted back in the early sixties.. --Edcolins 22:13, 15 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The statement in the article is correct for the US. As the software patents article says:
 * The USPTO maintained this position, that software was in effect a mathematical algorithm, and therefore not patentable into the 1980's. [In 1981], the court essentially ruled that while algorithms themselves could not be patented, devices that utilized them could.... by the early 1990s the patentability of software was well established...
 * I will add the phrase "in the US" to the article and remove the dispute tag. --Macrakis 22:49, 15 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thank you, this sounds fair. --Edcolins 16:53, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Lotus?
Lotus aquired VisiCalc, and stopped development. I think this fact needs documenting.

Platforms
The article says: "After the Apple II version, VisiCalc was also released for the Atari 8-bit family, the Commodore PET (both based on the MOS Technology 6502 processor, like the Apple), TRS-80 (based on the Zilog Z80 processor) and the IBM PC[2]."

where "2" is a link to http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/0922.html -- but I see nothing in this article about Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, or Visicalc for MS-DOS.

The only reference to ports of Visicalc I see are the last 2 sentences of that page: "Eventually, VisiCorp sued Software Arts when the company delayed development of VisiCalc for the IBM PC so they could first finish a version for the Apple IIe and III. Eventually, Software Arts' assets were sold to Lotus, which unsurprisingly stopped development of VisiCalc."

It's not clear from this that there ever was a port of Visicalc to any other platform -- except maybe the Apple III? Maybe there was, but this reference doesn't say so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.235.7.36 (talk) 07:13, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

am not too sure
Spreadsheets on computers existed way before from some old German software. I think it was the marketing aspect via DOS that got things going —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.18.192.21 (talk) 06:01, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Source
"VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, was one of -- if not the -- single-most important pieces of software in PC history. As Paul Laughton, who wrote Apple's DOS, put it, VisiCalc was "the thing that [made] microcomputers take off."

""If you knew VisiCalc, and what it did, and you were a skilled salesperson, and the right person came in the door," said Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of VisiCalc (along with Bob Frankston). "You could probably sell them a fully-loaded machine." "


 * The untold story behind Apple's $13,000 operating system.84.152.36.245 (talk) 21:48, 4 April 2013 (UTC)