VisiCalc’s Dan Bricklin at Apple WWDC 2011
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is running this week in San Francisco. On the WWDC website, you can only see the schedule if you log in, so I don’t know how much time is devoted to spreadsheets at the conference. My guess – not much.
However, Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, was at WWDC, and was interviewed by The Mac Observer.
“DB: Yep. I wrote the original prototype in BASIC on the Apple II. And I also wrote a little bit of the actual code. Bob Frankston wrote the bulk of it back in 1979. That was indeed the first killer app for the PC world. The personal computing world.”
These days, Dan Bricklin is creating apps for the iPhone and iPad.
“If Apple would let us, but Apple doesn’t like us to do things like that, we could probably build an [Intel] 8080 emulator for iOS and run the old IBM PC things like VisiCalc on the iPhone.”
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