History of Spreadsheets

Excel is today’s leader, preceded by Lotus 1-2-3, Visicalc, Muliplan, Quattro Pro and others. Here’s a rough history of the electronic spreadsheet. This is a placeholder history. It will be continuously updated as new history information is found and is relevant.

VisiCalc for the Apple II Personal Computer
VisiCalc running on an Apple II

The concept of spreadsheets became widely known due to VisiCalc, it was developed for the Apple II in 1979 by VisiCorp staff Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, significantly, it also turned the personal computer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a business tool.

VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet that combined many of the essential features of modern spreadsheet applications, such as a WYSIWYG interactive user interface, automatic recalculation, status and formula lines, range copying with relative and absolute references, formula building by selecting referenced cells. Unaware of LANPAR at the time PC World magazine called VisiCalc the first electronic spreadsheet.

Bricklin has spoken of watching his university professor create a table of calculation results on a blackboard. When the professor found an error, he had to tediously erase and rewrite several sequential entries in the table, triggering Bricklin to think that he could replicate the process on a computer, using the blackboard as the model to view results of underlying formulas. His idea became VisiCalc.

A common task for accountants was to prepare calculated “spreadsheets” on 13 column accounting paper. They had the same issue as with the blackboard above with redoing the calculations in the columns and rows. Accountants quickly embraced electronic spreadsheets, helping greatly in the growth of the software.

VisiCalc went on to become the first “killer application”, an application that was so compelling, people would buy a particular computer just to use it. VisiCalc was in no small part responsible for the Apple II’s success. The program was later ported to a number of other early computers, notably CP/M machines, the Atari 8-bit family and various Commodore platforms. Nevertheless, VisiCalc remains best known as an Apple II program.

SuperCalc
SuperCalc for CP/M

SuperCalc was a spreadsheet application published by Sorcim in 1980, and originally bundled (along with WordStar) as part of the CP/M software package included with the Osborne 1 portable computer. It quickly became the de facto standard spreadsheet for CP/M.

Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet for IBM PC DOS

The introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 in November 1982 accelerated the acceptance of the IBM Personal Computer. It was written especially for IBM PC DOS and had improvements in speed and graphics compared to VisiCalc on the Apple II, this helped it grow in popularity. The  1  in the name was for Spreadsheet. The  2  was for database. And the  3  for graphics.  This resulted in  Lotus 1-2-3 being the leading spreadsheet for several years.

Microsoft Excel for Apple Macintosh and Windows

Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Apple Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and then ported it to Windows, with the first version being numbered 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) and released in November 1987. Microsoft’s Windows 3.x platforms of the early 1990s made it possible for their Excel spreadsheet application to take market share from Lotus. By the time Lotus responded with usable Windows products, Microsoft had begun to assemble their Office suite. By 1995, Excel was the market leader, edging out Lotus 1-2-3.  Also, Lotus was purchased by IBM in June 1995. in 2013, IBM discontinued Lotus 1-2-3 altogether.

Google Sheets, Online, Web-based spreadsheets

In 2006 Google launched their beta release Google Sheets, a web based spreadsheet application that can be accessed by multiple users from any device type using a compatible web browser, it can be used online and offline (with or without internet connectivity). Google Sheets originated from a web-based spreadsheet application XL2Web developed by 2Web Technologies, combined with DocVerse which enabled multiple-user online collaboration of office documents.

In 2016 Collabora Online Calc was launched, notable in that the web based spreadsheet could be hosted and integrated into any environment without dependency on a 3rd party for authentication or maintenance. Collabora Online runs LibreOffice kit at its core, which grew from StarOffice that was launched 38 years ago in 1985.