The Story Behind the Story of VisiCalc

The real story behind the genesis of VisiCalc has long been controversial because of the clouded title over the intellectual property, the lack of patent coverage for software in that era, and the appearance of copycats of the software.

In 1977, at Texas Instruments, a design for a Table Processor was initiated as part of the new TI Personal Problem Solving software package by Dennis Van Dusen with a logical design. The TI Personal Problem Solving System business plan and design were shown to Dan Fylstra of Personal Software when he interviewed at TI in December, 1977. Dennis then shared the plan in greater detail with Dan Fylstra in January, 1978 as Dan was considering working on it at TI.

After a review by Danny Acker at TI, TI decided against the use of the design and released it to Dennis.

In February, 1978, Dan, owner of Personal Software (later Visicorp) and Dennis then began to form a larger company with Peter Jennings, and Betsy, Dan's wife, based upon Dan's Pet Assembler, Peter's MicroChess, and Dennis' Table Processor. Dan and Dennis met with a venture capitalist in Boston in February, 1978 who he had met through his Creative Marketing professor at Harvard Business School.

Dennis began to enlist several programmers to develop the Table Processor based upon the TI design, including John A. Kaminski, Linda Rutledge (Delbridge), and Johann Malmquist.

Later, after Fylstra met Dan and Bob, he enlisted their great assistance on the project. Based upon Dan's cloked exposure of the TI design, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston refined and developed the program through their company Software Arts (see: VisiCalc and the rise of the Apple II), and distributed by Personal Software in 1979 (later named VisiCorp) for the Apple II computer, it propelled the Apple from being a hobbyist's toy to being a much-desired, useful financial tool for business.

Dennis coached as a reviewer of the first alpha version of visicalc as it was developed. He also introduced VisiCalc into KPMG (on the Glass Packaging Institute budgeting study for reinvigorating glass soda bottle use in 1978) and at the World Bank (on a project for providing computer support to project managers while on mission in 1979).

According to Bricklin's version of the genesis, he was watching his university professor at Harvard Business School create a financial model on a blackboard. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to tediously erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table, triggering Bricklin to realize that he could replicate the process on a computer using an 'electronic spreadsheet' to view results of underlying formulae (see: interview by Joshua Coventry).

In any case, VisiCalc likely motivated IBM to enter the PC market which they had been ignoring until then. After the Apple II version, VisiCalc was also released for the Atari 8-bit family, the Commodore PET (both based on the MOS Technology 6502 processor, like the Apple), TRS-80 (based on the Zilog Z80 processor) and the IBM PC. Curiously, one of the VisiCorp (formerly Personal Software) developers of the VisiChart product was Mitch Kapor who was able to form a company called Lotus to serve the IBM PC.

[ Back to Texas Instruments Spreadsheet Design and VisiCalc Documents ]