In 1979 a small company released the world’s first “killer app” for the then tiny personal computer market. VisiCalc was like nothing that had been seen before, the very first spreadsheet for personal computers. People bought a computer just to get VisiCalc and its sales skyrocketed, even after multiple price increases. Exclusively available on the Apple II for the first year on the market, its powerful sales made Apple Computer a front runner in the personal computer wars of the 1980s.
Dan Bricklin conceived VisiCalc while watching a presentation at Harvard Business School. It was a financial model on a blackboard that was ruled with vertical and horizontal lines (resembling accounting paper) to create a table, and then writing formulas and data into the cells. Changes in one cell had to be manually rewritten over sequential entries in the table. Bricklin realized he could replicate the process on a computer and together with Bob Frankston they developed the VisiCalc program.
And then, after over a million copies had been sold across multiple computer platforms…VisiCalc faded from the computer scene and was ignominiously discontinued in 1985, after being bought out by the very company whose flagship product had killed it.