The first indication that home computers were going to be much different from their larger and more expensive cousins was probably the application VisiCalc. Designed and programmed by Dan Bricklin (born 1951) and Bob Frankston (born 1949) and introduced in 1979 for the Apple II, VisiCalc used the screen to give the user a two-dimensional view of a spreadsheet. Prior to VisiCalc, a spreadsheet (or worksheet) was a piece of paper with rows and columns generally used for doing series of calculations. VisiCalc replaced the paper with the video display, allowing the user to move around the spreadsheet, enter numbers and formulas, and recalculate everything after a change.
(Petzold: p. 366)
Who would have been able to tell at the time? But it tends to happen this way in different fields of life: an event that few people pay attention to at the very beginning is precisely the one that brings about huge changes. The developments that are welcomed as "revolutionary" —the projects that intend to be revolutionary from the get-go— don't always accomplish much. However, what was intended to be a small but innovative idea, something humble, something that didn't necessarily pretend to bring about any huge change is precisely what ends up turning things upside down very often. We have seen it with Linux too. In this case, VisiCalc made it clear that computers could be used by regular folks to perform their routine activities. As a matter of fact, they could help automate some of the more repetitive tasks and, more importantly, speed them up and make them almost totally reliable. That's what the introduction of the personal computer and these little apps changed. Computing was taken out of the university campus and the research centers, to be brought, first, to businesses and, later, to the home.
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