Software Arts
More info
- Creator
- Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston
- Released
- 1979
- Type
- Software developer
- Successor
- Lotus Development (acquired 1985)
The company that wrote VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers and the reason plenty of businesses bought an Apple II.
Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston founded Software Arts in Massachusetts in 1979. Bricklin had the idea as a Harvard Business School student, tired of recalculating case-study figures by hand. They wrote the program; VisiCorp published and sold it. VisiCalc became the original killer app: people bought an Apple II to run it.
The split between developer and publisher ended in a lawsuit over the rights in 1983, while Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC took the market. In 1985 Lotus Development bought Software Arts and quietly killed VisiCalc. Nobody ever patented the spreadsheet, which Bricklin has said he doesn't regret.