VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet program written for a personal computer, released in 1979 for the Apple II. It was designed by Dan Bricklin, then a student at Harvard Business School, and implemented by his collaborator Bob Frankston. The two formed Software Arts to develop the program, and it was published by Personal Software, the company later renamed VisiCorp. The original 1979 Apple II manual, archived at bitsavers, presents the product as an “electronic worksheet” and explains its operation to users who had never seen such a tool before.
The program presented the user with a grid of rows and columns on the screen. Each cell could hold a number, a label, or a formula referring to other cells. When a number was changed, every formula that depended on it recalculated automatically. Bricklin’s own account at bricklin.com describes the idea as a way to do the kind of repetitive financial modeling that accountants and analysts had previously worked out by hand on paper ledger sheets, but with the machine handling the arithmetic instantly when any figure changed.
What made VisiCalc historically important was not just the program but its effect on hardware sales. Business buyers who had no reason to want a hobbyist computer suddenly had a concrete reason to buy an Apple II: it ran VisiCalc, and at first it ran little else of comparable usefulness for them. This is the original example of what the industry came to call the killer application, a piece of software so compelling that people buy a whole computer to get it.
VisiCalc sold extremely well through the early 1980s and was ported to other machines, including the IBM PC. Its market position eroded after 1983 when Lotus 1-2-3 arrived with a faster, more integrated product built for the IBM PC, and after a costly legal dispute and the decline of VisiCorp. The program’s influence, however, ran straight through Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel and every spreadsheet since.
Bricklin has noted on his own site that he never patented the spreadsheet concept, partly because software patents were not commonly pursued at the time. As a result the basic idea spread freely, which accelerated the entire category. VisiCalc remains the canonical first member of one of the most economically significant software categories ever created.