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So I also teach this university course about the history of technology, where students also learn how to use spreadsheets.

This semester, some of my students were surprised to learn that (a) spreadsheets existed before Windows 🤨 and (b) even a DOS spreadsheet could do everything we learned on the modern spreadsheets, just differently in some cases.

In this demo, we'll compare LibreOffice Calc on Linux and Quattro Pro on DOS.

youtu.be/Z5LXMpcZjEw

Lukáš Kotek

@freedosproject Few years ago I experimented a bit with Visicalc for DOS ( bricklin.com/history/vcexecuta) and I was so surprised how mature software it was! It would easily address the most of the things I need from spreadsheets even today.

www.bricklin.comVisiCalc Executable for the IBM PCNo Summary

@trilobyte It's amazing that VisoCalc invented many of the standards that continue today, especially A1 addressing.

When I show my students the history of spreadsheets, I start with VisiCalc.

But VisiCalc can't do forward referencing. I'll show that in the next video. That's why there was the recalc key shortcut.

We take fwd ref for granted today, not there in VisiCalc. (To be fair, it would have been a big performance problem on the Apple II.)

@freedosproject @trilobyte Forward referencing means keeping track of cell dependencies and automatically recalculate when a cell changes?

@clacke Yes, exactly. VisiCalc couldn't do it, you had to tap the ❗ key until the numbers stopped changing.

Lotus 123 could do it.

LANPAR did it by default in 1969, ten years before VisiCalc, but it was basically a compiler so that's not surprising.