Episode 46 of the PodLeaders show - 46 mins 02 secs
My guest on the show this week is Dan Bricklin. Dan Bricklin is the inventor of the spreadsheet. Dan, along with Bob Frankston released the world’s first spreadsheet, called VisiCalc in 1979.
Dan has worked on many projects since and recently has started work on wikiCalc - an open source, online spreadsheet application.
Here are the questions I asked Dan and the times I asked them:
Dan, can you give us a bit of background about yourself, how did you get into computers first day? - 0:51
And that was where you got the inspiration for VisiCalc? - 02:59
Visicalc was written for the Apple II platform, wasn’t it? - 04:07
This was before IBM came out with the PC, wasn’t it? - 05:16
Do you have any idea how many lines of code you are talking roughly - 06:21
How did Microsoft come to dominate the spreadsheet market then? - 07:11
Having created the world’s first electronic spreadsheet, you were unable to patent it because of the patent laws of the day… - 11:57
Audience questions:
Lar Veale
MS Excel (and most other MS products) has an excess of features that very few people will actually use, ever. Does he see the success of online spreadsheets being in some way dependent on going back to the basics and focusing on the core features - simple things like entering numbers and performing calculations on them? - 15:55Also, as he is involved in wikiCalc, would be interested to hear what he makes of Google Spreadsheets - 22:44
A big difference between wikiCalc and Google Spreadsheets, Zoho and similar offerings is that you can download and host wikiCalc yourself… - 24:34
Do you think VisiCalc would be granted a patent if it was invented today? - 26:58
On the topic of patents, ask him to outline how they won in Texas and what his experience was like as an expert witness. I gather it took up a considerable amount of his time last year - 27:58
My questions once more:
What have you been doing between VisiCalc and wikiCalc, you mentioned 9 patents? - 33:15
Can you tell us why you decided to go open source with wikiCalc? - 36:24
And you are launching wikiCalc 1.0 later this month - what is next on your roadmap? - 43:05
Download the entire interview here
(21.1mb mp3)
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