Podcast: Dan Bricklin, wikiCalc

16-10-2006

by Tom Raftery

Tom's guest this episode is Dan Bricklin. Dan Bricklin is the inventor of the spreadsheet. Dan, along with Bob Frankston released the world's first spreadsheet, called VisiCalc in 1979.

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Dan has worked on many projects since and recently has started work on wikiCalc - an open source, online spreadsheet application.

Here are the questions Tom asked Dan and the times asked:

Dan, can you give us a bit of background about yourself? How did you get into computers first day? - 0:51

And that was where you got the inspiration for VisiCalc? - 02:59

VisiCalc was written for the Apple II platform, wasn't it? - 04:07

This was before IBM came out with the PC, wasn't it? - 05:16

Do you have any idea how many lines of code you are talking roughly? - 06:21

How did Microsoft come to dominate the spreadsheet market then? - 07:11

Having created the world's first electronic spreadsheet, you were unable to patent it because of the patent laws of the day... - 11:57

Listener questions:

Lar Veale

MS Excel (and most other MS products) has an excess of features that very few people will actually use, ever. Does he see the success of online spreadsheets being in some way dependent on going back to the basics and focusing on the core features - simple things like entering numbers and performing calculations on them? - 15:55

Also, as he is involved in wikiCalc, would be interested to hear what he makes of Google Spreadsheets - 22:44

A big difference between wikiCalc and Google Spreadsheets, Zoho and similar offerings is that you can download and host wikiCalc yourself... - 24:34

Eoghan McCabe

Do you think VisiCalc would be granted a patent if it was invented today? - 26:58

Dennis Howlett

On the topic of patents, ask him to outline how they won in Texas and what his experience was like as an expert witness. I gather it took up a considerable amount of his time last year - 27:58

Tom's questions once more:

What have you been doing between VisiCalc and wikiCalc, you mentioned nine patents? - 33:15

Can you tell us why you decided to go open source with wikiCalc? - 36:24

And you are launching wikiCalc 1.0 later this month - what's next on your roadmap? - 43:05

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