October 11, 1979: VisiCalc Introduced

by Chris Seibold Oct 11, 2010

If the pre-eminant program in the history of the Mac was PageMaker, the seminal program in the history of Apple was Visicalc.

Visicalc, as one can guess by the illustrative name, was a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are a dime a dozen, but Visicalc was a little different in that it was the first spreadsheet. Overnight, once-arduous tasks became a matter of a simple recalculation. Businesses now had an obvious money-saving reason to purchase a computer, and the only computer that ran Visicalc was the Apple II.

Visicalc made the Apple II, and has become an essential computing tool (in various forms). It was introduced this month in 1979.

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Comments

  • “The program that made the Mac”? The Macintosh and the Apple II are very different, distinct computer platforms. Perhaps you meant, “The program that made the Apple II, etc”.

    Steven Weyhrich had this to say on Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 7

  • Yes, of course. Thanks for pointing that out.

    Chris Seibold had this to say on Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 354

  • Why does clicking on the left-side “Recent Articles” links to these articles result in seeing no article at all?

    MarkSF had this to say on Oct 11, 2007 Posts: 14
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