What were reviews of the world's first spreadsheet products like?

[andydtaylor]

Hi,

Somewhat off topic but are there any anecdotal or other sources online capturing the user accounts of the first spreadsheet products? If the internet had been around in 1985 I'd imagine someone would have said that Excel will never catch on, no substitute for a calculator & pencil... etc. Conversely maybe someone actually predicted that it would eventually change everything... I'd like a resource I could cite in a presentation at work - maybe a scan from a PC mag review, that kind of thing.

Thanks,

Andy

 

[mole999]

LANPAR, available in 1969,[8] was the first electronic spreadsheet on mainframe and time sharing computers. LANPAR was an acronym: LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random.[8] VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet on a microcomputer,[9] and it helped turn the Apple II computer into a popular and widely used system. Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet when DOS was the dominant operating system.[10] Excel now has the largest market share on the Windows and Macintosh platforms.[11][12][13] A spreadsheet program is a standard feature of an office productivity suite; since the advent of web apps, office suites now also exist in web app form.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet

My issues at the time were using 5 1/4 floppies to load a programme, lack of memory, and no co-processor running in a Amstrad PCW512 environment

 

[NdNoviceHlp]

If I recall correctly, VIP Professional (not sure who made it) had about 6 floppy disks but was somewhat programmable and seemed advanced for it's time. Anyone else familiar with that one? Seems like an 80's flashback. Anyways, thanks for the memories. Dave

 

[FDibbins]

I cut my teeth on SuperCalc and then moved to Lotus 123. If memory serves, back in those days, 123 and excel would leap-frog each other with upgrades, and early days, both were mainly (only?) keyboard driven

 

[MrIfOnly]

I recall using Lotus 123 on an IBM pc around 1986 and AppleWorks on my Apple IIc around the same time and printing them out using the state-of-the-art (and very slow) bubble-jet printer. Can't remember for the life of me how many 5-1/4" floppies they took though. Lotus 123 was the software-du-jour of the day.

Good times!

Regards,

CJ