History

Visited the Computer History Museum yesterday


Wow
It's all there


Flashbacks to my own, meager, exposure 
Brief video covers most of it for me
The Art of Writing Software - CHM Revolution


Fortran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Formula Translation" and the need to develop a language higher than machine language (binary code) 


I hired on to do punch cards for MSU Grad Students while in high school, learning a bit of Fortran in the process


Later, pretty much passed on Cobol COBOL - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and picked up a bit of Basic BASIC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia to run on my first Apple II

While I managed to develop a basic financial oriented program (as if my lines of code could be describe as such) that would plot cyclic data patterns (stocks) it was cumbersome and not time efficient. I could manage to follow a handful of stocks, updated at the end of the day.


Then: VisiCalc 1979

Bob Frankston and Dan Brinklin

Harvard MBA candidate Daniel Bricklin and programmer Robert Frankston developed VisiCalc, the program that made a business machine of the personal computer, for the Apple II. VisiCalc (forVisible Calculator) automated the recalculation of spreadsheets. A huge success, more than 100,000 copies sold in one year.





Spreadsheets !!!


A higher level of data manipulation and I was home
Been working with spreadsheets ever since. 
When "macros" were introduced, I commented "looks like code - I don't do code anymore"