Dan Bricklin chronicles his life in the computer world with pictures and text.
From the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet.
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Dan Bricklin's Log
The life of Dan Bricklin as a consultant, PC industry old-timer, podcaster, and amateur photographer
Author of Bricklin on Technology (Available now from Wiley)
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Socialtext is releasing the latest SocialCalc in a wide beta [link]
This morning Socialtext is announcing that they are releasing SocialCalc (integrated into their enterprise-level wiki) in a wider beta, basically available for test to all of their paying customers. This release includes many advances since their last, much more limited beta release. It includes: Multi-level multi-sheet rollup (the old one only went one level down and didn't recalc that sheet), a much more polished user interface, faster save and load, better integration of advanced wikitext functionality, and all of the other advances in the latest SocialCalc (such as Ctrl-C/V system clipboard support for quick exchange of data with Excel and other applications). Socialtext developers and I have been working a long time to get to this. (While this uses the same basic spreadsheet engine as the OLPC version, it has lots of special Socialtext-specific UI code and makes use of SocialCalc's intersheet reference capabilities as well as Socialtext's online storage, collaboration, and access control functionality.)
 Screenshot of SocialCalc spreadsheet page in Socialtext
For me, this is really a major moment. I finally can do the demo I've been wanting to do for years: A complete budget example with a rollup of 50 states into a country total, with each of the 50 states' pages dependent upon other pages with country-wide values (such as price lists and model factors), and each with a link to a wiki discussion page.
 You can change a master model factor (such as default growth or default product mix) or a particular state's values (such as sales growth override value) and then load the USA or regional page and see them all recalculated to provide the latest totals. We are showing that demo at the Enterprise 2.0 conference starting later this morning. I've made a 5-minute Camtasia screencast of the demo that you can look at here. For more information from Socialtext, go to their web site, www.socialtext.com.
Monday, June 22, 2009
New SocialCalc release for the OLPC [link]
This is a very exciting time for the SocialCalc project. For the last year I have been enhancing the main Open Source SocialCalc JavaScript code in various ways, many under the covers, but a few that show up in the user interface (such as a status line with recalc progress, support for Ctrl-C/V, some Move commands, and more).
That code is being used in a few projects. One is at Socialtext (which is paying for most of the development), which is taking the core engine and UI components and enhancing them with a much more polished UI and deep integration into their enterprise-level wiki and social software system. Look to them for some announcements in that regard soon, but not today. What they are doing is really great and achieving some of the main visions I've had for this project, as you'll see.
Other developers have added enhancements to the base code to integrate it onto the One Laptop Per Child's XO computer (and other systems based on the Sugar framework). People have been using earlier versions of this on the XO around the world for the past year. Today they have released a version that integrates XO-specific graphing functionality (needed for educational and other purposes) with my new code. This version is being made much more generally available than the previous early versions. Hopefully, it will result in SocialCalc being a standard component on XO computers.
What's really heartening for me is that the OLPC version involved the work of different people around the world who added new code to complement mine. This version is the basis on which other work is being done in the coming months to add other capabilities and to model and document different uses for schools and for use in microfinance.
You can read about the XO version (version 0.8.3g) on the Software for Education, Entertainment and Training Activities (SEETA) "SocialCalc on Sugar" page. Moving to this stage has been spearheaded by Manusheel Gupta in Delhi, India. Thank you, Manu!
You can read about the latest plain SocialCalc code, version 0.8.3, on the "Software Garden OLPC Home Page". It includes a release of my code (it does not include the new graphing code that is OLPC-specific and that was created by Nicholas Doiron, an engineering student from Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A. -- that's only in 0.8.3g). You can run a test version there with most modern browsers.
"What's Next in Tech?" event this week [link]
This is going to be a busy week. One event is the "What's Next in Tech: Exploring the Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond" event that Future Forward is hosting at the Boston University School of Management. (I'll be bringing some copies of my book "Bricklin on Technology" to give away.) There are some heavy hitters on both the panel (including Mike Dornbrook, COO, Harmonix Music Systems, the makers of "Rock Band", and Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot Corp. and founder of The Droid Works, and a few local venture capitalists who are funding new technologies) and in the audience (well-known bloggers, analysts, young entrepreneurs, other sources of capital, and more).
Friday, June 11, 2009
"What will people pay for?" excerpt [link]
One of my more popular essays is the one on "What Will People Pay For?". A version of it has been reprinted in the Harvard Business Review, and it forms the start of Chapter 2 of my book. As part of posting various excerpts from my book on YouTube, I've added one of me reading that essay along with the blog post about cell phones that follows it in the book.
You can see the excerpts on my book videos page.
My blogging has been sparse again as we approach some new milestones with SocialCalc. (More about those later.) Tweeting (@DanB) is much less overhead and I've continued doing that. I'm working on a new essay, though, that comes out of a session I ran at a Mass Tech Leadership Council unConference.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
All hail VisiCalc: 30th anniversary of the public announcement of VisiCalc [link]
On June 4-7, 1979, the National Computer Conference was held in New York City. As a side show, in a hotel down the street, there was a Personal Computing Festival. It was at that show that VisiCalc, the pioneering personal computer spreadsheet, was announced and first shown to the public.
In the general community, even in the general business community, there was little reaction at the time. Unlike today, when an upgrade to an operating system makes the evening news, major news organizations didn't even recognize the significance of this new tool when it was right there in front of their faces. Many individuals who saw VisiCalc demonstrated understood the implications and, when it shipped in late October 1979, brought it into their companies and had a temporary advantage over others. Over the next couple of years, businesses started to understand its value. By the time IBM announced their PC two years later, they made sure to say that it would have VisiCalc and that it would be ready when they first shipped.
30 years later, it is pretty amazing how far we have come. Personal computers are in most homes in the USA. A huge percentage of all people carry a personal computer in their pocket or purse (merged with a wireless telephone) that they use for text, voice, photo, and video communication, and increasingly for computing tasks including games, data organization like calendars and contact lists, and sophisticated graphics rendering. Spreadsheets are taught in grade schools and are used by millions of business people. Many young adults would rather have a laptop computer and an Internet connection than a television.
To commemorate this anniversary, Bob Frankston, who wrote most of the code for VisiCalc, and I, who came up with the specification of what it did, recorded some videos. In mine I read the part of my new book that is about the announcement, including the "almost" news report in the New York Times ("All hail VisiCalc" as part of the article "A Layman's Trip into the Mega-Mega Land of Computers"). Bob reads the entire text of the paper he delivered at the Personal Computing Festival part of the NCC and comments on it.
You can find these videos embedded on "Dan and Bob's Videos About the VisiCalc Announcement in 1979".
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Reading excerpts from my book [link]
At the suggestion of various people, I recorded videos of me reading some excerpts from my book. You can see the videos (which are on YouTube) embedded on the "Videos for Bricklin on Technology" page. The first is from the very beginning of the book, followed by the beginning of Chapter 5 on Cooperation. The second video is the section of Chapter 1 titled "The Mindset of an Engineer" and includes a poem that I like as well as a joke with a message.
Over time I will probably record some more excerpts and post them. If you have any favorite passages in the book, let me know.
I was on "This Week in Tech" [link]
As part of publicizing my new book I've been contacting various technology podcasts and radio shows to see if they want a copy and if they'd want me on their show. One of them was the This Week in Tech show (twit.tv). It is mainly a podcast, but also available as streaming video during the show. The host, Leo Laporte, responded that he'd love to have me on the show. I was on it this week, Show 196. I've written up the whole experience of preparing and then appearing on it over Skype video. If you are interested in video, audio, or how the show is done, you might find it of interest.
Here's a photo with Leo and me:
 The permanent URL for the material currently on this home page is http://danbricklin.com/log/2009_05_27.htm. You can go there now to find an archive of what's posted on this home page. Link to anchors there for individual postings.
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© Copyright 1999-2009 by Daniel Bricklin
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Send comments to Dan at comments at bricklin dot com.
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