The Pre-VisiCalc Spreadsheet: Bell Canada's 1969 Budget System Innovation
By
rbanffy
Crackles when you bite it. Shows the baker did the work.
Summary
The article reveals that VisiCalc, commonly considered the first spreadsheet, was actually preceded by an earlier spreadsheet system developed a decade earlier. In 1969, two Bell Canada engineers, Rene Pardo and Remy Landau, created a spreadsheet-like system to solve the problem of managers needing months of programmer time to update budget models. Their innovation allowed managers to create their own budget forms interactively, predating VisiCalc's desktop spreadsheet by ten years.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledMany people think of VisiCalc as the first spreadsheet, and while VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet on the desktop, it's not actually the first spreadsheet.
Ten years before VisiCalc, two engineers at Bell Canada came up with a pretty neat idea.
At the time, organizational budgets were created using a program that ran on a mainframe system.
If a manager wanted to make a change to the budget model, that might take programmers months to create an updated version.
Rene Pardo and Remy Landau discussed the problem and asked 'what if the managers could make their own budget forms as they would normal'
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