Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?

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Dan Bricklin

Brief Description: Co-creator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet

Further details:

The co-creator (with Bob Frankston) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet, Dan Franklin has been a developer, inventor, entrepreneur, and business person, with both a degree in Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard.

The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to Franklin while he was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on his MBA degree, in the spring of 1978. Here's how he tells the story himself:

"Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream. 'Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse...' (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto). And '..imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer "10% will be fine!"' (10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't do very complicated calculations...)
The summer of 1978, between first and second year of the MBA program, while riding a bike along a path on Martha's Vineyard, I decided that I wanted to pursue this idea and create a real product to sell after I graduated."

That's just what he did, though his vision became more realistic, and the heads-up display gave way to a normal screen. He and Bob Frankston decided to form a company under which to do business: Software Arts, Inc., incorporated on January 2, 1979.

VisiCalc was first shown to the regular personal computer press in a special room at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in May of 1979. The first "real" release, version 1.37, shipped in mid-October 1979. In 1985, though, Software Arts' assets were sold to Lotus Development Corporation, the creators and publishers of the 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and Lotus decided not to continue publishing VisiCalc.

"If I invented the spreadsheet today, of course I would file for a patent," Bricklin says on his incredibly candid Web site documenting the rise and fall of VisiCalc. In 1979, however, when VisiCalc was shown to the public for the first time, patents for software inventions were infrequently granted. Programs were thought to be mere mathematical algorithms, and mathematical algorithms, as laws of nature, were not patentable.

His latest endeavor is wikiCalc and textCalc.

Published Feb. 5, 2007— Reads 149,700 — Feedback 48
Copyright © 2007 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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▪ Does i-Technology Matter?

▪ Where's i-Technology Headed in 2007?

▪ Who Are the Top 100 i-Technology Heroes?

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▪ Brad Templeton: Pioneer Whose Company Began the Dot-Com Era

About Jeremy Geelan
Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the all-new International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series, of the International Virtualization Conference & Expo series, of AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, and of the long-running SOAWorld Conference & Expo series. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.

Reader Feedback: Page 1 of 4

#48	Justin Hart commented on 18 Feb 2007 Vint Cerf's name is Vinton Cerf, not Vincent Cerf.
#47	pvdg commented on 9 Feb 2007 I'd begin with: N°1 : Charles Babbage (designed the first computer) N°2 : Konrad Zuse (built the first working computer)
#46	pvdg commented on 9 Feb 2007 What about Seymour Cray? Bill Gates was a "hero of i-Technology" and I didn't know? What technology did he invented?
#45	kjell krona commented on 6 Feb 2007 In your list of IT heroes, I am missing some of the important people involved in the Graphical User Interface, as first instantiated in Macintosh UI (and later was copied by Microsoft): Douglas Engelbart, who at SRI in the 60's invented, among other things, the idea of a mouse, overlapping windows, hypertext, outlining, video collaboration, and many other things that later inspired a lot of people to improve interaction with computers; Larry Tesler, who at Xerox Parc (working with Alan Kay on Smalltalk) invented among other things the modeless editor and, I believe, cut/copy/paste, and later moved to Apple and worked on the Lisa and Macintosh; Bill Atkinson, who wrote the "Quickdraw" graphics layer in Macintosh, proving that advanced bitmapped graphics was possible on a low-end processor; the orignal MacPaint, basically the predecessor to Photoshop, without which the graphical world today would be lost; and Apple HyperCard, which with its successors showed what "user programming" could mean, and accustomed people to the idea of "linking" pieces of information with clickable buttons, which subsequently exploded in the World Wide Web. - kjell
#44	Lars Arvestad commented on 6 Feb 2007 \|\| m6 commented on the 6 Feb 2007: \|\| Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is \|\| a hero? The word "hero" should of course be used sparingly, and probably not in adjunction to "tech", but JWZ holds his place among the Big Hackers, IMHO. Some of his accomplishments, in no particular order: * XEmacs. He was one of (the?) main people making a user-friendly version of GNU Emacs. * XKeyCaps. This little application has really helped me getting a sane keyboard layout under X a few times. * Mosaic. I believe he was the main hacker on the Unix version of the first "real" browser. And one of the first employees at Netscape.
#43	fm6 commented on 6 Feb 2007 Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is a hero? I only know him from reading his comments in the Netscape keyboard resource file when I was trying to get the browser to behave under Linux. These left me with a permanent dislike for the dude: instead of explaining the format of the file, he put in lengthy sarcastic (and misinformed) rants about the "mistakes" made by various Unix vendors in designing their keyboards.
#42	Ron Blessing commented on 5 Feb 2007 Every time I see one of the computer Hall of Fame articles in a magazine it seems to me there is always one glaring omission. I know there are many that have contributed but I feel like there are two people that deserve to be mentioned and always seem to be missed. Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, in my opinion, started what eventually led to our current Internet when they launched the first dialup Bulletin Board system called CBBS. In addition, Ward developed the first widespread file transfer protocol, XMODEM, which allowed files to be transferred error free between bulletin boards around the world. ...Ron Blessing
#41	Grady Booch commented on 5 Feb 2007 I'm quite flatted that you've numbered me among your top twenty all-time technology heroes. As for the Renaissance jazz bit, I play the Celtic harp, on which I perform a number of medieval and renaissance pieces. I once had an instructor who taught me some great improvisational skills, and thus the phrase, Renaissance jazz, for I like to do riffs off of really old themes. I think I would have been an itinerant musician or a priest if I were not doing software :-) Grady
#40	InOtherNews commented on 5 Feb 2007 Yakov Fain has devised his own version over here: http://yakovfain.javadevelopersjournal.com/who_are_the_heroes_of_itechno... in case anyone wants to take a look.
#39	More Nominees commented on 5 Feb 2007 There's a great supplemetary list by Mark Hinkle here: http://www.encoreopus.com/content/view/334/35/. Among the new names he adds are Jarkko Oikarinen, Bram Cohen, and Jerry Yang & David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!
#38	i-net user commented on 5 Feb 2007 Congratulaions, you have just insured that I will never willing used AJAX in any of my projects. Your pop-over add that blocks the article is annoying at best.
#37	Barry Threw commented on 5 Feb 2007 Vannevar Bush Norbert Weiner John Von Neumann Claude Shannon John Pierce
#36	kelley meck commented on 4 Feb 2007 You have to include Claude Shannon, and you might want to consider Oliver Selfridge. Shannon was the mathematician who figured information theory, and Selfridge started everything behind neural networks--which have never caught up with modal programming, but whose promise is unbounded.
#35	Lee Butler commented on 4 Feb 2007 You should also remember Michael J. Muuss. He developed "ping" and was instrumental in some of the developments of TCP/IP and Unix in the early days. He worked at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.
#34	Carsten Schlemm commented on 4 Feb 2007 Jeremy, I am a bit disappointed you forgot Konrad Zuse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuse). His problem is that he doesn't have an Anglosaxon name.... Judge for yourself. Cheers, Carsten