In this ITConversations interview with Dan Bricklin (co-creator of VisiCalc), Dan talks about the early days of VisiCalc, his road to VisiCalc, and what he’s doing now.
There are several gems. One that struck me was that in the first year of sales of VisiCalc–this would be 1979-1980 time frame–VisiCalc was selling 1,000 units a month. That surprises me. It seems kind of high–particularly for a new product–especially back then. But I have to search back in my memory to those days and I guess it seems like many of the Apple enthusiasts would have spread the word rapidly amongst themselves about the product. There were only a couple microcomputer magazines at the time and I think just about everyone read them so it wouldn’t be hard to reach them. Very interesting. As an industry, were we more “connected” then?