Excel is practically synonymous with the word "spreadsheet" today, and has attained near ubiquity in the workplace and home. But it wasn't always the reignin...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/1047745

Excel is practically synonymous with the word “spreadsheet” today, and has attained near ubiquity in the workplace and home. But it wasn’t always the reigning champion of the spreadsheet market.

In fact, Excel started out as a Macintosh exclusive, with Gates and Microsoft hoping that Excel could build a commanding position on the Macintosh, and then use that as a foothold to attack the dominant spreadsheet champion of the 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3. The Macintosh was in dire need of a killer app that could do for it, what VisiCalc had done for the Apple II years prior.

But could Excel be that app?

This is the story of how the world’s most dominant spreadsheet was developed for the flailing Macintosh, a computer with a fraction of the market share of the then standard MS-DOS PC, from which humble position Excel began its long climb to total dominance.

#spreadsheet #excel #documentary

    • HubertManne@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      It was kinda funny as in the early to mid 90’s I would be crazy to do a science lab on anything but a mac which had the easiest to use graphing and such. then corporate wise lotus123 was just entrenched by the late 90’s but then the very late 90’s into 2000 office just took over. maybe coinciding with win 95 becoming dominant. At least that is how it felt to me at the time.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        The spreadsheet programs, yes, once you’ve learned one you’ve learned them all, but I highly recommend anyone learning programming to avoid BASIC entirely just because horrible coding practices are basically baked into the language and the syntax is so dissimilar from anything else out there. There were a lot of things I had to “unlearn” when I got into C and C++.