VisiCalc

• VisiCalc was a $100 software sold on a $1000 Apple computer.
  It made Apple a serious platform for doing business.
• Dan Bricklin, an MBA student, had an “Aha” moment when he noticed his professor teaching “What-if”.
  Every time one or more variables changed, the professor had to erase and write equations.
  He felt that the process can be done easily with an interactive electronic spreadsheet.
• Bob Frankston had worked on business oriented programs (e.g. report generators) on the mainframe computers.
• Dan and Bob founded Software Arts to develop VisiCalc.

Competitors

VisiCalc was challenged by SuperCalc and numerous other programs that offered improvements.

• Ultimately, VisiCalc lost to Lotus 1-2-3 by Mitch Kapor.
• Mitch integrated three functions
  (a) Spread sheet
  (b) Graphs
  (c) Data Management.
• Lotus was bought by IBM.

Microsoft came up with Office which included Word (for Word Processing) and Excel (for Spreadsheet).