They joined forces, and Microchess became the signature product for the young company.Welcome to Constant Variables, a podcast where we take a non-technical look at mobile app development. Fylstra was a programmer, Harvard MBA student, and a writer for Byte Magazine. To change these arrows to move up or down, you had to press the spacebar to toggle the arrow keys to move vertically or horizontally.Īlso in 1978, Peter Jennings of Microchess fame met Dan Fylstra of Personal Software. Two Arrow Keys? The first Apple computers only had left and right arrow keys. It was quite a challenge for Frankston to fit the software into the 24K available on the Apple ][. The heads-up display was replaced with an Apple ][ keyboard. Working in a Cambridge attic during 19, Frankston brought Bricklin’s invention to life. It was a practical invention Bricklin was constantly doing case study analyses using only a calculator.īricklin teamed up with Bob Frankston. What if you combined a fighter-pilot heads-up display and put a trackball on the bottom of a calculator? You would be able to roll the calculator backward to any previous entry, change the number, and all future calculations would change. In 1978, at MIT, a graduate student named Dan Bricklin had a vision. Any accountant at the time kept a large eraser nearby because when you discovered that one number was wrong, all of the subsequent rows had to be recalculated. However, unless you were a hard-core chess fan, you probably were not going to pay $1000 to $2000 for a computer for the sole purpose of playing MicroChess.įor the average accountant, in 1978 a spreadsheet was still a large piece of green ledger paper with number figures written in with a mechanical pencil. It was one of the first computer games and eventually sold millions of copies. Peter Jennings wrote MicroChess and sold the first copy in December 1976. Byte magazine claimed to have 73,000 subscribers in 1976 people running computers like the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. In the 1970’s, personal computers were in their infancy. It was the right idea, but it would take fifteen years before sufficient computing power was available at a low enough price for most companies. Companies typically used teletype terminals to dial into a time-sharing mainframe, where charges were accrued by the minute. Unfortunately, the computer hardware of the time was expensive and not readily available to the masses. Mattessich was clearly on the right track in the 1960s. Rather than being a general-purpose program like VisiCalc, Mattessich’s approach required a knowledge of the Fortran language. His book included the Fortran programming code to allow any firm with a mainframe computer to eliminate the mechanical pencils for the specific application of budgeting. His Simulation of the Firm through a Budget Computer Program detailed a program that would allow rapid recalculation of a company budget. In two books published in 1964, Mattessich proposed electronic spreadsheets for solving such problems. It could take a week to recalculate an entire budget, by which time the original assumptions would be obsolete. Using rows and columns for accounting can be traced back to August DeMorgan, a London mathematician in an 1846 book entitled Main Principle of Bookkeeping.Ī Berkley professor, Richard Mattessich, realized that performing budgetary what-if analyses by hand was not productive.
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