Word: bricklin
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...Daniel Bricklin: Software = Hard Cash
...idea dawned on Daniel Bricklin in 1978, while he was looking blear-eyed at blackboards filled with columns of numbers during classes at the Harvard Business School. The professor would be engaged in one of those "what-if," or spread sheet, exercises in corporate financial planning for which the B School is famed. Every time a figure in one of the columns was changed, those in several other columns had to be recalculated as well. "Just one mistake on my calculator," recalls Bricklin, 31, "and I would end up moaning, 'My God, I got the whole series of numbers...
That winter Bricklin, an M.I.T graduate and confessed computer "nerd" since his teens in Philadelphia, and an M.I.T. buddy, Bob Frankston, 33, worked day and night to develop a program for doing such number crunching on a small computer. The result was an electronic spread sheet: VisiCalc (visible calculator). Initially, VisiCalc got a lukewarm reception from computer stores. But when another B School grad, Daniel Fylstra, 31, who had just started up his own company, Personal Software Inc., stepped up the marketing, VisiCalc took off. Word began to get out about its enormous powers. With only a few presses...
...bench mark for success among independent programmers remains the record of Daniel Bricklin, a Harvard Business School graduate, and Robert Frankston, a computer scientist, who created VisiCalc in 1979. With nearly 400,000 copies sold for up to $495 apiece, VisiCalc, a financial-analysis system for businesses, remains the single bestselling piece of software. Like other successful programmers, Bricklin, 31, and Frankston, 33, have expanded their business well beyond the prototypical home attic where many first get their start. They reinvested the VisiCalc income (more than $11 million) in their new company, Software Arts, with headquarters in an old chocolate...
...company's main product is VisiCalc, a program for small computers that helps small-and medium-size businesses in planning and budgeting. Fylstra did not develop VisiCalc. That was done by Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston, software designers and M.I.T. alumni. But Fylstra was the one who began marketing it, and turned VisiCalc into the most popular small computer program. So far, some 200,000 copies (price: $250) have been sold. Expected sales for VisiCalc and the company's other software programs this year: $35 million...