This TED Talk features software pioneer Dan Brickland, recorded live at TEDx Beacon Street, 2016.

How many of you have used an electronic spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel?

Very good.

Now, how many of you have run a business with a spreadsheet by hand

like my dad did for his small printing business in Philadelphia?

A lot less.

Well, that's the way it was done for hundreds of years.

In early 1978, I started working on an idea

that eventually became Visicalc.

And the next year, it shipped running on something new

called an Apple II personal computer.

You could tell that things had really changed

when six years later,

the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial that assumed you knew what VisiCalc was and maybe even were using it.

Steve Jobs back in 1990 said that spreadsheets propelled the industry forward.

Visicalk propelled the success of Apple more than any other single event.

On a more personal note, Steve said that if Zicalk had been written for some other computer,

you'd be interviewing somebody else right now. So Fisicalk was instrumental in getting personal computers on business desks. How did it come about? What was it?

What did I go through to make it be what it was? Well, I first learned to program back in

1966 when I was 15, just a couple months after this photo was taken. Few high schoolers had

access to computers in those days, but through luck and an

awful lot of perseverance, I was able to get computer time around the city. After sleeping in the

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