Dan Bricklin

Inventor of the modern Electronic SpreadSheet.

An unacknowledged savior of Apple. At a time when Apple was losing market share, and with their sales in a slump, Dan Bricklin and (mostly coded by) BobFrankston (together, SoftwareArts), brought forth a program that allowed a decidedly plastic modeling of numbers, interactively, on a computer monitor.

One of the direct effects of this was that people bought AppleComputers just to run VisiCalc. This program drove a sales recovery for Apple, but I don't ever recall having seen an acknowledgement from Apple to that effect.

VisiCalc was the second of the "big three" must-have applications that justified personal computing: 1) the WordProcessor [WordStar, MagicWand, WordPerfect], 2) the SpreadSheet [VisiCalc, SuperCalc, Lotus123] 3) the desktop DataBase [dBASE II, Paradox].

With those three things available to Joe Everyman, personal computing was from then on lodged firmly in the world of business.

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CategoryPerson? (A category isn't consistently applied to such folk.)