It was 1978.

A Harvard Business School student, Dan Brickland, was sitting in a classroom watching his

accounting lecturer filling in rows and columns on the blackboard.

The lecturer made an alteration, then had to work down and across the grid, erasing

and rewriting other numbers to make everything add up.

That looked like boring, repetitive, hard work to Dan Brickland.

And laziness could be the mother of invention.

The lecturer wasn't the only one writing down numbers in rows and columns, then taking

ages to rub them out and recalculate.

Accounting clerks all over the world did that every day in the pages of their ledgers.

A two-page spread across the open fold of the ledger was called a spreadsheet.

The output of several paper spreadsheets would then be the input for some larger master

spreadsheet.

Making an alteration might require hours of work with a pencil, eraser and desk calculator.

Like many business school students, Brickland had had a real job before going to Harvard.

He'd worked as a programmer at Wang and DEC, two big players in 1970s computing.

And he thought, while on earth would anyone do this on a blackboard or on a paper ledger,

when you could do it on a computer.

So he wrote a program for the new Apple II personal computer, an electronic spreadsheet.

A friend of his, Bob Frankston, helped him sharpen up the software and on the 17th of October,

1979, their brainchild, Visicelk, went on sale.

Almost overnight, it was a sensation.

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