Word: visicalc
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Daniel Bricklin, 29, and Robert Frankston, 31, a team of new-wave composers, have penned a dynamite disc that has grossed an estimated $8 million. It is not a punk-rock smash, but an unmelodic magnetic number called VisiCalc, the bestselling microcomputer program for business uses. The featherweight sliver of plastic is about the size of a greeting card, but when it is placed in a computer, the machine comes alive. A computer without a program, or "software," is like a $3,000 stereo set without any records or tapes...
Three years ago, Bricklin, then a first-year Harvard Business School student, conceived VisiCalc while struggling with financial-planning problems on his calculator. He enlisted the aid of Frankston, a longtime friend and an expert programmer, to develop a new piece of computer software that would make juggling all those figures easier...
...partnership paid off. Since late 1979 nearly 100,000 copies of nine different versions of VisiCalc have been ordered at prices ranging from $100 to $300. It is far ahead of other business programs like Data Factory and General Ledger, and even outsells the programs for Star Cruiser, Dogfight and other arcadelike computer games...
...VisiCalc translates simple commands typed on a keyboard into computer language that the machine then uses to solve problems. It enables a businessman, for example, to manipulate labyrinthine equations to calculate financial trends for his company. If he changes one figure, the machine can tell quickly how that affects the other numbers. A firm that gives its workers a 10% pay hike could estimate how that action would alter its costs, sales, profits, or dividends...
...computer program is being put to a wide range of uses. It helps Allerton Cushman Jr., a New York financial analyst, to project insurance-industry profits during the week and tote up his income taxes on the weekend. The Cabot Street Cinema Theatre in Beverly, Mass., bought VisiCalc to figure out which pattern of movie show times draws the best box-office receipts. An accounting firm in Las Vegas plans to use VisiCalc to tell its gambling-house clients how to position slot machines around the floor to ensure the biggest take. VisiCalc is obviously one composition that...