Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV

"paul c" <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac> wrote in message news:_z3fg.214770$WI1.170357_at_pd7tw2no...
> Frank Hamersley wrote:
> > ...
> > One of my early jobs was to port Visicalc to a mainframe (CDC Cyber)!
> >
> > The IT manager had seen it demo'ed on a US trip and thought it might be
> > useful. When I left 3 years later it was being heavily used throughout
> > the various mine sites we operated.
> >
> > Fortunately I was not there to migrate all the sheets to PC's.
>
> I know this isn't supposed to be a folklore site but can't resist.
> Mid-1970's, worked for a marketing guy who'd developed some neat little
> syndicated consumer studies, all based on flip-chart-sized spreadsheets
> (his term) partly produced by me with various half-assed PL/I, BAL and
> RPG but mostly organized by a formidable six-foot plus Scottish woman
> named Ella who had been to comptometer school in the old country. Boss
> was regularly after me to make a spreadsheet program for the old 360.
> Unfortunately for me I spent almost as much time trying to arrange
> service for the mf as Ella did for her comptometers, otherwise I imagine
> I'd be in the South Seas now sans internet and not bothering this group.
> Boy I felt stupid when Visicalc came out. Then Supercalc appeared which
> was better and then 123 which outsold both even before it was written,
> shades of Oracle. Always liked the way spreadsheets removed code from
> programs echoing the dbms's that had started to removed data structure
> (but not navigation) from pgms, even before Codd got going big time.
> Besides a whiteboard and a camera they still seem quite useful for
> fleshing out requirements. Still want a s/s pgm with a visual i/f like
> M$ Access'.

I can't resist either.

My first exposure to spreadsheet software was a little program called "expensive desk calculator" running on a PDP-1 computer on the MIT campus, in 1963. The PDP-1 was the first computer made by a company called DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), founded by an MIT guy. Some people here will remember DEC for VMS, the VAX and the Alpha, but that came much later.

I failed to realize the significance of what I was looking at. I sure felt stupid when I eventually got exposed to Visicalc like products. I think the first one I actually saw was Multiplan, sold by Microsoft, and running under CP/M on a DEC Robin.

I incorporated the "look and feel" of a spreadsheet, but without the "guts" in a data entry program I was writing for managers. By "without the guts", I mean that the entry program couldn't parse and execute formulas in cells. Instead, all the formulas were hard coded into the program. But the screen had the nice feature that whenever you entered a number, all numbers derived from that one were automatically updated. Since most of my users had never seen a spreadsheet, the fact that this was a "fake" spreadsheet made no difference to them. They liked the immediate feedback.

This was in 1981 or so, just before I began learning "relational stuff". Received on Wed May 31 2006 - 13:49:31 CEST