Machine Intelligence Made America Great Again In 1982

Dan Bricklin, of Newton, Mass., inventor of the personal computer spreadsheet, stands with a laptop computer in his Newton home, Wednesday, May 24, 2006 (AP Photo/Steven Senne) When President Carter talked to Americans in July 1979 about their crisis of confidence--"the erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America"--Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were witnessing the rapidly rising confidence in their electronic spreadsheet, the first killer app for the PC. A little over three years later, Time magazine named the PC "the Machine of the Year," observing that this innovation "happened to pop up when it did, right now, at this point in time, like the politicians call it, because we were getting hungry to be ourselves again." This week's milestones in the history of technology include the birth of VisiCalc, the world's first handheld-sized scientific calculator, and Daguerreotype photography. Software Arts is incorporated by founders Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for the purpose of developing VisiCalc, the world's first spreadsheet program, which will be published by a separate company, Personal Software Inc. (later named VisiCorp). VisiCalc will come to be widely regarded as the first "killer app" that turned the PC into a serious business tool.