A brief history of graphs:
logic diagrams (Ex: Venn diagram) go back to the 1200s, with Ramon Lull
William Playfair, a Scottish political economist and engineer - invented the bar chart (1786) and the pie chart (1801), first time-series line graph. Only graph he missed was the scatter plot.
William Playfair: "information, if it is perfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained; and a man who has carefully investigated a printed table finds, when done, that he has only a very faint and partial idea of what he has read; and like a figure imprinted on sand, is soon totally erased and defaced."
"appeal to the eye... the best and readiest method of conveying a distinct idea"
dashboards - show many indicators simultaneously
tableaus - show one indicator in many groups
spreadsheet: a 2D array of cells, either filled with alphanumeric text or numeric values (inputted directly, or calculated with a formula that depends on other cells). Originally oversized sheets of 'spreadable' paper with columns and rows, meant to organize data. Used to fold out of a ledger. In use for 100s of years.
recent advances: "dynamic" and "interactive" graphs
graphs + maps → through GIS (geographic information systems)
1961: Professor Mattesich pioneers computerized spreadsheets for accounting. Then Pando and Landau invent LANPAR (LANguage for Programming Random Arrays), used at Bell and AT&T for budgeting. After a long lawsuit, they get a patent in 1982, which is eventually ruled as unenforceable.
Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc
Bricklin, then a student at HBS, was one of the few in his class with a computer science background. After watching his professor draws charts on the board, and erase and replace all the values when he made a single mistake, Bricklin starts dreaming of "an electric blackboard and electronic chalk in a classroom." He builds a prototype in integer basic, with 5 columns and 20 rows, and uses it to ace an assignment on financial projections. Soon thereafter, he recruits MIT acquaintance Bob Frankston, who packs the program in 20k of memory, and adds key features like scrolling.
Fylstra joins the team, and with his marketing background, suggests they put in on the new Apple II computer. They receive some coverage from the New York Times, then are forgotten for nearly two years.
Suddenly, computers become an alternative to calculators, and businessmen begin to justify the $5,000 for the computer, plus added costs for a printer (roughly the value of a low-end car) for their companies. It does take a while for people to realize that the spreadsheet organizes numbers, but also calculates them (some people glue calculators to their keyboards) but they soon begin to appreciate the value of this ground-breaking tool.
The program sells 1,000,000 copies. It is the first 'killer app' - software so good that people buy hardware just to run it. They call it 'VisiCalc' - short for 'visible calculator.'
Steve Jobs later says of the app, "it propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved," and "VisiCalc propelled the success of Apple more than any other single event."
On his design inspiration: "if it took longer to input something on a spreadsheet, you would have done it already by hand instead. So I tried to make it as simple, as minimal, as possible."
It is worth noting that lots of people were using rows and columns for financial projects, but no one had put them on one 2D layout.
Bricklin thought hard about how to reference numbers. First, he tried naming variables (a typical computer science solution), but realized it would take too long to name everything. Then, he thought of automatically numbering new inputs. Finally, he settled on a grid, which opened the door for ranges of numbers.
Part of the success of VisiCalc came from its status as general purpose tool, as people began using it for reasons Bricklin hadn't even envisioned himself. It was a complex tool that was simple to use. "There are many tools," he would later say, "that seem simple - think of pencil and paper - that are very complicated to build. A pencil is not a trivial thing to build."
VisiCalc gets into some legal issues, and while distracted, allows Lotus 1-2-3 to rise under the direction of Mitch Kapor. Lotus adds integrated charts, making their program not only a calculation solution, but a data presentation one as well. As DOS becomes the dominant operating system, the Lotus program rises to new heights.
In their first year (1983), Lotus make $53M in revenue), then go public. The following year, their sales triple to $156M ($393M in today's inflation-adjusted dollars). They then acquire Software Arts and discontinue VisiCalc, a now 'obsolete' product.
Kapor says of the spreadsheet: "it's like the transcontinental railroad. It accelerated the movement, made it possible, and changed the course of the nation."
Wall Street takes the spreadsheet, and runs with it to model more complex plays, "what if" scenarios, and opens new markets for things like derivatives. A new role becomes popular: the analyst.
A massive shift occurs, as people decide to trust computers blindly to output the right answers.
Excel
Soon thereafter, Gates makes Excel, the first to use a graphical interface that works with a mouse (point and click). Lotus enters into its own legal battles, while Excel takes market share. In 1995, IBM acquires Lotus, and keeps the product running until 2013.
In a recent interview, Bricklin reflects on the computerized spreadsheet: it's like whoa, we haven't thought of something better yet."
problems with the spreadsheet:
- hard to have internal accuracy checks (research shows that 94% of spreadsheets contain errors)
- lack of revision control, permissioning
thinking about spreadsheets: think of them as mathematical 'graphs'
How Steve Jobs got the ideas of GUI from Xerox:
Xerox was a printing company, afraid that a revolution in personal computing would render them obsolete. At PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), they