Wednesday, October 01, 2003
VisiCalc and Bloatware
VisiCalc was released for the IBM PC in 1981. Dan Bricklin posted a copy of VisiCalc on his web site here. It's a DOS executable. You can run it under Windows or DOS. The Apple II version of VisiCalc was the major reason that people started buying Apple computers in the early days -- it was the "killer" application for the Apple II. As a result of the revenue generated by these Apple II sales, Apple was able to fund the development of the Macintosh. In a similar way, Lotus 123 was the killer application for the IBM PC. It drove PC sales generating revenue for IBM which spawned the PC "clone" market -- and made Lotus wildly successful in the process.
In case you download VisiCalc to try it out you can consult the reference card. To quit, type "/SQY" (Storage, Quit, Yes).
VisiCalc (vc.com) is only 27K. An entire functional spreadsheet application in only 27K. It's easy to rant about how applications have gotten so bloated in the 22 years since VisiCalc was released. Is Microsoft Excel XP that much more functional than VisiCalc to justify the couple hundred megabytes of disk space it occupies? Well, yes and no. It depends on what you need. Joel Spolsky does a good job discussing the "bloatware" issue and the tradeoffs that developers make on features vs. code size. That's not to say that there are no oversized applications out there. I see them all of the time but that's in my judgment. Clearly someone decided that it wasn't worth the effort to make the program smaller or provide options in the Installer to allow you to avoid installing features that you don't want.
One other thing: it's pretty impressive that this 22 year old program can still run on operating systems that we can use today. The DOS environment is pretty simple in comparison to Windows XP but it's still impressive that upward compatibility has been maintained over such a long stretch of time. I wonder: will Microsoft Excel XP run on a computer 22 years from now?
In case you download VisiCalc to try it out you can consult the reference card. To quit, type "/SQY" (Storage, Quit, Yes).
VisiCalc (vc.com) is only 27K. An entire functional spreadsheet application in only 27K. It's easy to rant about how applications have gotten so bloated in the 22 years since VisiCalc was released. Is Microsoft Excel XP that much more functional than VisiCalc to justify the couple hundred megabytes of disk space it occupies? Well, yes and no. It depends on what you need. Joel Spolsky does a good job discussing the "bloatware" issue and the tradeoffs that developers make on features vs. code size. That's not to say that there are no oversized applications out there. I see them all of the time but that's in my judgment. Clearly someone decided that it wasn't worth the effort to make the program smaller or provide options in the Installer to allow you to avoid installing features that you don't want.
One other thing: it's pretty impressive that this 22 year old program can still run on operating systems that we can use today. The DOS environment is pretty simple in comparison to Windows XP but it's still impressive that upward compatibility has been maintained over such a long stretch of time. I wonder: will Microsoft Excel XP run on a computer 22 years from now?
RSS 0.92 Feed