VisiCalc

Dan Bricklin – VisiCalc Co-Founder

You can find personal notes, photos and videos from Dan Bricklin, in the VisiCalc section of his personal website: http://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm

In the following video, Dan Bricklin reads from his book, “Bricklin on Technology”, about the first public announcement of VisiCalc, in June 1979.

Bob Frankston

In the two videos below, Bob Frankston, co-creator of VisiCalc, reads and comments on the paper he delivered in June 1979 at its debut at the National Computer Conference.
Part 1

Part 2

VisiCalc Shipment and Sales

When was VisiCalc shipped out? When selecting a date for Spreadsheet Day, I found the following sources that showed October 17, 1979 as the date that the first fill copies were shipped out. These sources were key players in VisiCalc’s development and sales – Peter Jennings and Dan Bricklin.

Shipped October 17th

Peter Jennings, one of Dan Fylstra’s partners at Personal Software/VisiCorp, was responsible for their MicroChess program that helped fund the early advance royalty payments for VisiCalc.

You can find his VisiCalc notes on his personal website: http://www.benlo.com/visicalc/visicalc4.html

On his VisiCalc page, Jennings has notes on the shipment and early sales of VisiCalc:

“The first copy of VisiCalc for the Apple ][ (Version 1.37) went out the door on October 17, 1979. By the end of the month, we had shipped 1293 copies.”

VisiCalc ship date

Byte Interview

In 1989, Byte magazine interviewed Dan Bricklin and Bob Franston, for the article “Ten Years of Rows and Columns” published in Byte, issue 13/1989, pp. 326-328.

In a sidebar to that article, Birthing the Visible Calculator, Bricklin mentioned October 17th as the date that VisiCalc came out:

“VisiCalc came out October 17, 1979, at $99, and people paid hundreds of dollars for the board just for the extra 10K bytes of memory.”

October 19th Delivered

On Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc site, he shows a note that Dan Fylstra received his copy of VisiCalc on October 19th. Bricklin also noted that his copy arrived the following day, October 20th.

On that page, Bricklin marked October 19th, 2009, as the 30th anniversary of VisiCalc.

Dan Bricklin Tweets – October 2021

On October 19, 2021, I had the following friendly exchange with Dan Bricklin on Twitter. He was marking that day as the anniversary of VisiCalc.
Here’s his first tweet, with a follow-up question from Hjalmar Gislason:


Next, I replied with the source for our Spreadsheet Day date.


Here are the next two tweets from Dan Bricklin, and he’s okay with us celebrating on October 17th.


Next, I shared my other source for the October 17th date:


Dan Bricklin’s next two tweets are shown below


So, we’ll continue to celebrate Spreadsheet Day on October 17th, with the okay from Dan Bricklin.
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