"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Friday, June 17, 2011

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"



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