Fame

Fame
: One of the neat thrills of coming to blog conferences in Boston is seeing Dan Bricklin. I’m in awe of the man. If you don’t know why that’s a big deal, that’s a shame, and here’s why:

Bricklin really made this revolution happen. He co-created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, and that is the single thing that made computers useful. Making things useful is, in my mind, a high art. Jobs and Woz made computers cool and accessible. Gates made them, depending on your perspective, rich or evil. But Bricklin made them useful. That is what put computers on every desk in the world. That is what allowed them to be connected, in turn. That is what led to the Internet, after all.

Anyway, over wine and cheese last night, I was standing in a group with bloggers including Bricklin and he pointed to another blogger (sorry, I can’t remember who) and said how excited he was to get a link from that person. He spoke with the excitement of a Chicago mom getting called on by Oprah to speak on camera.

“But, Dan,” I said hesitantly, “you’re the… legend.”

“But I’m not a legend to me,” he said.

Even Bricklin loves blogjuice.

: At the technology session this morning, Bricklin (too briefly) got to talk about the future of these tools and all they need to do. He wants to be able to place and edit photos and edit text fluidly. It will take millions of dollars in development, he says. But it could be done in open-source…

5 responses to “Fame”

  1. Anil Avatar

    I have to wholeheartedly second the respect and admiration for Dan Bricklin’s accomplishments and modesty. Meeting him was probably one of the few times I’ve been nervous to talk to someone I “knew” through their blog, and he was so welcoming and kindhearted that it was even more of a pleasure than I’d hoped. Glad to hear you felt the same.

  2. Jeff Jarvis Avatar

    As I remember at the last conference, Anil, you had me take a picture of you being on the same panel with Dan, for posterity. It was a charming moment.

  3. Eric Pobirs Avatar
    Eric Pobirs

    As a professional writer, shouldn’t the word processor, which predates the spreadsheet, get this accolade? I’m willing to bet you spend at least an order of magnitude more time on your computer creating and editing text than speculative number crunching. John Draper got a lot of folks to buy computers before Visicalc hit the shelves.
    I don’t want to disparage Bricklin’s achievement but the spreadsheet is far from the most used productivity app on personal computers. Excel sells very few copies separately from the Office suite but Word does a considerable business as a standalone product or with the Works suite for under $100. Millions of users who feel fairly adept with their word processor have never found a use for a spreadsheet. Popular products like Quicken have largely displaced the need for people to work out the structures and formulations for themselves and since the bulk of folks do no significant math beyond their finances have no use for the versatility of a spreadsheet app.

  4. Jeff Jarvis Avatar

    Eric: Here’s why it’s important… In the old days, executives had secretaries type their memoes; they didn’t need to process words. But spreadsheets let them get to the guts of their real business, playing what-if with their numbers, doing budgets, and so on. That was the first reason executives had to get computers.

  5. Eric Pobirs Avatar
    Eric Pobirs

    No Jeff, those folks were accountants, not the bosses, unless it was a fairly small company. I was selling computers in the 80’s and a lot of machines went to people who were sneaking them into the company through the back door. The bosses wouldn’t believe anything that came from a computer smaller than a Buick.
    I knew one CFO who got an 8″ drive for his Apple ][+ just so he could move files to be printed on giant greenbar sheets in the MIS department. Coming off an Epson MX-80 the CFO’s numbers weren’t official.