The Rise of Microsoft Excel: Part 1
Вставка
- Опубліковано 22 жов 2023
- Excel is practically synonymous with the word "spreadsheet" today, and has attained near ubiquity in the workplace and home. But it wasn't always the reigning champion of the spreadsheet market.
In fact, Excel started out as a Macintosh exclusive, with Gates and Microsoft hoping that Excel could build a commanding position on the Macintosh, and then use that as a foothold to attack the dominant spreadsheet champion of the 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3. The Macintosh was in dire need of a killer app that could do for it, what VisiCalc had done for the Apple II years prior.
But could Excel be that app?
This is the story of how the world's most dominant spreadsheet was developed for the flailing Macintosh, a computer with a fraction of the market share of an MS-DOS PC, from which humble position Excel began its long climb to total dominance of the PC spreadsheet market.
#spreadsheet #excel #documentary - Розваги
I was just one of about 10 programmers that joined Doug Klunder (and continued in his absence) to complete Excel 1.0.
Phil Florence was never a very respected member of the team - he introduced a lot of bureaucracy, and not very much technical understanding. We mostly ignored him. Klunder wrote almost all the core parts of Excel - recalc especially, with others filling in around the periphery and fleshing out all the features and capabilities.
Our real secret weapon was also the team at Microsoft that created the p-code interpreter; our C compiler compiled to a vastly more space-efficient p-code rather than 68000 machine language. This decision allowed us to not only fit twice the functionality into the same amount of RAM, but also enabled us to implement a feature like virtual memory so we could page code on and off of floppy disk to save space. Natively compiled programs for the Macintosh didn't have any of those advantages.
Very interesting, thank you for taking the time to leave such a detailed comment!
Your team literally changed the world once Excel 1.0 was released. Such a legacy!
My introduction was moving from Lotus 1-2-3 in graduate school to Excel 4.0 in one of my first jobs right afterwards. Microsoft included native support for the Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts to make transition easier. I still use keyboard shortcuts in Excel all the time.
@@amerigo88 The slash ('/") commands stuff. I was introduced to Lotus 123 r.24 back in 1996 at college. I really missed the sound coming from the floppy drive A when program is being loaded into tiny RAM.
I was not aware of the p-code interpreter - I was a member of the works team from 1990 on - yeah thats a whole sordid story all together. I can't imagine how life was working around gates at that time. For that alone you deserve a medal.
Building 6?
@@douglasspencer9819 Northup building for Excel 1. Then building 3 for next releases.
I was also one of the 10 programmers that joined Doug Klunder on Excel 1.0. The first "new hire" assigned to help Doug was Mark O'Brien, an excellent programmer who had the difficult task of filling Doug's shoes while Doug was off picking lettuce.
As Mike Koss said above, Phil Florence never really meshed with the team, and after his heart problems, it was Jeff Harbers who stepped up and managed the final development march. Excel was fortunate that the team was able to replace Doug with a large team (by Microsoft's standards at the time) of experienced, talented, and motivated programmers. Most of them had just come off of shipping other Macintosh application, like Microsoft Chart or File, so they were skilled with the Macintosh platform and had learned how to ship an application.
Doug Klunder was the best programmer I've ever known, but after he quit Excel to be a migrant farmer, I don't think he ever got his old enthusiasm back. Excel was his masterpiece. And I think his burnout (if that is indeed what happened with him - I don't know for sure) shows a major downside of Bill Gates' management style at the time.
It is phenomenal to me that you and Mike Koss are here commenting on this. Excel is one of those quintessential programs that I have used from when I was a student in primary school to make simple graphs to today where I use it for automating calculations using test results in my laboratory job. Never would I think I would see personal comments on UA-cam from team members who were there at the foundations of its development.
@@spartansfan1026 We are all in our 60's now. But I think we'd all say Excel was about the best project we were ever honored to be a part of.
Thank you for taking the time to share this invaluable piece of computing history.
Ditto
Excel is my favourite application, ever.
I have used it all my engineering life and interestingly, the back end within it does not appear to have changed much. Yet the interface has been tweaked a lot.
Excel is one of the most important contributions to the engineering community. Thank you for commenting, 😮
Living legend❤
Never boring.
True that.. he is a great story teller and a great narrator
I almost went to Microsoft in Seattle in 1989. Had an ex-manager of mine move back to there and told me to follow him up. I submitted my resume to them and interviewed. Didn't take it because they wanted me to pay for my move and take a 20% pay cut. At that time Seattle housing market was booming and I knew the cost of living would outstrip my salary within a year or so.
I went to Peter Norton Computing Inc. instead, stayed in SoCal, and helped build up their Test department. I worked on Norton Utilities, Norton Commander, and my main project was Norton Backup for DOS. I was there when Peter sold the company to Symantec. I did eventually burnout and leave. But what a time and a ride.
This video is bringing back some memories for me 35+ years later.
As a programmer, I can't deny that I have had moments on projects where I have come close to quitting computing forever and going to pick lettuce.
Same here. Unfortunately I am now too old to do that kind of job either.
I have always found the computer industry of the 80s and 90s to be absolutely fascinating. Thank you for this.
It really was the Wild West back then.
What just occurred to me is that these type of industrial battles always seem to be in the US. Why is that? I’m specifically thinking about the auto and computer industries.
I've never done this before, but when I saw a video about The Rise of Excel, from a channel called Another Boring Topic, I instantly clicked, liked, and subscribed. I've got high hopes.
I remember the Lotus-like tools and add-ons from the mid 80s. Jazz, Javelin etc . Lotus was already dropping the ball even before Excel became a competitor, and it was eye-watering expensive. It was one of the first tech companies to go nuts with executive salaries
Bro I was about to go to sleep! I’m hyped to watch this video tomorrow
I love this shit. You have a great voice for these kinda mini documentaries, please make more its all fascinating history! And of course its never boring
Kapor was right though - Jazz and Excel weren't competitors, mainly because Jazz was a monumental failure that only people who were around at the time really recall at all, while Excel is still Microsoft's best product. The $150m Microsoft gave Apple meant little - the promise to release a new version of Office for Mac was the big deal.
Totally agree about Excel being Microsoft's best product. Developed in-house, not bought out from some other dev company, and an all-around solid piece of software then and now.
Excel is such a joy to use... so many clever features. I agree, one of the best apps or software from Microsoft
Absolutely great video documenting the history of what most people today consider a dry-as-the-desert piece of software that we take for granted. I think the most important thing to understand about software development in that time period was how "killer app" oriented it was, because you didn't sell machines to just soak up other people's software, you needed to make sure that out of all the disparate solutions available (MS DOS, IBM DOS, Amiga, Mac, the list goes on) that you're hardware was the one worth buying, or that your software worked with the most popular pieces of hardware for business uses. While that still rings true today in some respects, compilers/web based applications making so many applications cross compatible, and the wide availability of software means that commercial software is more about cornering a market of users, and not so much a particular environment.
4:45 I am not sure if this feature is pointless today. Some Excel spreadsheets are massive. There is a famous case of (I think) the UK publishing wrong COVID numbers because they used Excel, but an old version, which was limited to 65,536 rows and they tried to make bigger spreadsheets, losing some of the data. The current version of Excel supports up to 1,048,576 rows an 16,384 columns, so up to over 16 billion cells.
Ugh. My company made large and expensive ERP software. It’s stunning how often we went to implement and discovered that big companies were running their whole business on dozens of Excel spreadsheets! Not even Access! (Although some of them were using that too). And this was in the 2010s!
We came in with an Oracle or SQL Server product and brought their whole business together for the first time. One customer told me the relief in workload and the increase in reliability, speed and capability to deliver more to the customer was like the relief of passing a giant poop after being constipated for years.
And in my experience, even todays limit is t enough 😂
Strange that Mac, THE TOOL for desktop publishing, laser printing, and then graphic artists, averted death thanks to that most quantitative of 1980's applications - spreadsheets.
it says something I clicked on an Excel Spreadsheet history so quick. thanks
edit: how could they not go for Mister Spreadsheet:(
Every time I watch one of your videos I am educated and reminded of how old I am. ;-) Great content as usual.
Thank you for blessing us with this!
As a Win32 developer in C++, this hits me in my feels. Something for tomorrow!
Take the day off tomorrow!
It happens NOW!
Just in time! I've got some soldering to do!
Love the nod to your WIP videos!! Can't wait for Windows part 2+3
Your videos are unique and amazing
I love the idea of people screaming at each other about spreadsheets.
This is why I subscribed when I watched a video of yours for the first time awhile back. Awesome work.
Fantastic as always!!
this was really cool to hear about. You gave a clear view into the atmosphere of the time. Thanks for your hard work documenting that wild period of time
Fantastic and entertaining video!
My experience with spreadsheets started with Lotus 123 on DOS then Quattro Pro.... but when we migrated to Macintosh, MS Word 4 and Excel 2 for Mac became our daily tools. Excel was nice to use because of the GUI but lacked some of the power of Quattro Pro at first but Excel 3 blew all that away.
Wordperfect and Quatropro were wonderful. So much more approachable.
was looking forward to this. my thanks
4:30 recalculating an entire sheet is still arduous if you have too much data or are running complex formulas
God I love Excel. It is the basis behind everything I do at work all day everyday. This was really interesting. I feel for those guys. I began consulting for a major industry that I knew well, but it was only 18 months before I went back to working in that industry. The 100 hour weeks I did were just too much. I was averaging about 80 hours...twice what I do now per week. 110 hours was my record in a 7 day period. Horrific.
Amazing content!
A hidden gem. Thank you.
*sees future video lineup*
*breathes heavily*
PowerPoint was originally a Macintosh program
Love your videos
I saw just the intro video (of the channel) and immediately subscribed
Amazing.
Fire 🔥
Amazing video - would love to see this kind of retrospective for Microsoft Works too it stayed around until 2009 having started in 1987 - with a Mac version released in 1988.
The works project was filled with a lot of drama as well. I was only there on the periphery, but it was definitely a soap opera developing version 2.0 - and that really is an understatement. Melinda was the group product manager at that time. Who knows, maybe SteveB can chime in and give us the blow by blow of works 2.0 development. Some of the backdrop was actually a bit tragic..but I only know this second hand.
Man, I completely forgot about Works until you mentioned it. I always wondered what happened to it.
Thank you for this video. You do great research. I would enjoy a similar video on Microsoft Access, please.
This isn't boring... this is an interesting story about this seemingly mundane program that much of the world practically runs on. My father was a pro at Excel. Also, Steve Jobs was reportedly often stinky... And PowerPoint was also a Mac program first. I'm actually surprised that the Get a Mac ads made it seem like a big deal that Macs "finally" run MS Office apps.
Computers are a fascinating aspect of culture. I think it's interesting that development teams were much smaller in the early days of the GUI.
TSRs. That takes me back.
Great video thx
I like this video it was pretty good can't wait for the next part
I came back to check whether or not you've made part two yet looks like you haven't I'm sad
:(
Glad you enjoyed the video!
Regarding the next part, I wouldn’t expect it for at least a year, maybe longer. There are multiple videos in the queue right now before I can even think about starting work on the next part of Excel’s story.
Yes finally!!
We have waited too long!
There was another strong contender - Borland's Quarto Pro. For many it was better than Excell, but MS was a tough bully
Yes, I used Quatropro and Wordperfect for quite awhile. $99 for the suite.
subscribed and liked. great videos. need more boring stuff
Absolutely perfect for having to be stuck in awful traffic
More like another riveting topic
OMG, once I was a software trainer/supporter for Lotus 1-2-3/M (implementation for MVS) in the 90-th. Excel with all the bugs I've meet later ;-)
Yay! Like, then watch ❤
Trust me.... this is NOT boring....
I had the privilege of working with Lotus 123 and the various interpretations of sheets in the late 80s ....... and, so this has been very much a part of the development of my personal development as a human...... plus we always win when we ask " why is Bill Gates a multi gazillioniare??"👍💯❤️🎇💥
4:54 this is a personal attack, sir
❓
These are good stories but you really need to show more of the software and how it works. I've heard of Lotus 123 but no1 ever shows what it did, how it works, why was it so "killer-app", etc.
No 1 takes you cereal.
I keep being late to the damn party, lmao. Wonderful! :D
You love to see it
Part II Please
Good
To think that without Microsofts investment, Apple would not have survived in all likelyhood. (To be fair, it was not altruism on Gates part. They pretty much had to do it to avoid a monopoly situation)
Edit, go figure that i should watch the intro before commenting. :D
Actually they did it in lieu of being sued by Apple for steal QuickTime code IIRC. Maybe Jobs smartest business move though, after selling NeXT to Apple.
You should mention Filemaker, it rounded out necessary business functionality on Macintosh for a very long time.
Question: I specifically remember encountering Excel for MS-DOS, circa 1990 or thereabouts. Obviously it was eventually ported to DOS. Was that after the Windows version?
To the best of my knowledge, there never was a DOS version of Excel. However the first version of Excel for Windows (2.0) utilized the Windows 2.0 runtime, allowing it to run on MS-DOS computers that didn’t have Windows installed.
There was no runtime version of Windows from 3 on, so I believe Excel 2 was the sole version to use it, future versions required a full Windows install.
There was never a character-based version of Excel - it only ran on graphical platforms, like Windows, Mac, and OS|2. Maybe you're remembering Microsoft Works, a character-based software suite that included a very nice spreadsheet.
I'm apparently misremembering,@@richardpowell1220 -- from screenshots I found on the web, apparently saw Excel for Windows before Windows was version 3, wasn't familiar with Windows, and thought it was DOS.
Are you aware that Apple and MS have an agreement regarding the office suite of products… that is the mail, pages, numbers and keynote can directly share files formats and mail has complete Exchange integration… and now the Visual Studio engine has been ported everywhere…
Great video! I lived through this time (using a 128k Mac in college and later bought a “fat Mac”).
Somehow I had the misapprehension that Microsoft bought Excel. This is much more interesting.
Billg deserves a heck of a lot of credit for his GUI vision and not going after lotus with a me 2 excel for ms-dos. No one knew how the GUI world was going to play out, and anyone who says they knew windows would be a huge success would be lying. MSFT completely, and I mean completely, under estimated the demand for windows 3.0.
I’m fascinated by the idea of a programmer who hates tech and left to be a farmworker. Even more fascinating is that this is the guy that created Excel, of all programs.
Where is the boredom, I was promised?
Your videos are amazing. I really like it. I am a new subscriber to your channel. Can I talk with you Another Boring Topic?
❤❤❤
Ledge!
👍
is intelligent recalc genuinely no longer needed? i know machines are insanely quick these days, but some spreadsheets are insanely massive potentially
You're one of those people... Fook writing clean efficient code. Throw hardware at it....
@@Katchi_ Did you mis-read what I wrote? I questioned no longer requiring intelligent recalc and made the argument it IS still needed.
@@Katchi_ You owe me a reply. Either apologise for your original nasty message or rebuke me that's your options.
But if you do neither I will keep responding till you do
So the Microsoft Ignite event was a Keynote Event. Apple?? 😂
Thank Lotus for the Term Vaporware … btw IBM bought Lotus
Having used the other 'calcs, 123 was heaven.. until it got so bloated I couldn't get it to run stable.... then I got excel and..... 123 did itself in.
The automatic recalculation still freezes excel if have more than 3 columns with referenced cells
I love watching videos about your boring topics
And I really do watch and listen to them, despite them being "boring". keep 'em coming!
It ain’t done till Lotus won’t run.
It's crazy a tool older than me is how I make money
13:36 - Lucky us
Lotus 1-2-3 was vastly superior in so many ways.
Contrary to the Channels name, it's far from boring.
I always thought that Charles Simonyi was the main man behind to Excel.
Charles was the head of the entire end user applications' group. He was never the lead of any particular Microsoft product that I'm aware of (maybe Word 1.0?), but he did make hands-on contributions to many of them. For Excel, he may have had some input on some early architectural decisions (or maybe not - I'm not 100% sure), but he wasn't involved in the day-to-day development of Excel.
Jabe and Doug were the main forces behind Excel.
I don't understand the written commentary at 4:56. Recalculating the spreadsheet when one thing is changed is literally feature #1 of a spreadsheet application (regardless of size of document) and has nothing to do with using a spreadsheet as an "ersatz RDBMS."
To be frank, I’m mostly just being a smart aleck :)
If your spreadsheet is so massive that you need intelligent recalc to avoid seeing significant system slowdowns whenever a value is changed, even on a modern system…it’s probably a sign that the spreadsheet is far too large.
And one of the main things that can cause that is when Excel is used as a lightweight relational database, instead of moving to an actual relational database.
Fair warning! I’m a database programmer so I may have a slight bias ;)
my prefered spreadshhet pre windows... AsEasyAs
5:05 That’d be the last time until chromium edge lol
Funny that excel was the Mac only app whole multiplan was for Windows
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
please work first on the part 2 of the rise of windows !!!!!
I am working on editing RoW part 2 right now :)
I did the majority of the Excel video editing while waiting for the audio for RoW part 2 to be edited, so very little time was lost.
RoW part 2 is almost two hours long (1:54 to be exact, not counting video snippets from sources such as the Computer Chronicles) so it’s going to be at least a couple more months before I get it edited, if not longer.
Avery unholy war. It was tiring.
Apple versus Microsoft versus Linux...... And here I'm sitting thinking they all suck. Just a different things.
I wonder how someone cannot be bathed but clean shaved. hmmm?
F4mi and low spec gamer have made videos talking about gabe Ik you probably know what he went on to do lol
This video was recommended to me and I was interested but in the very beginning you falsely (and this is widely falsely believed) that Microsoft bought $150 million in shares in Apple which kept them from collapsing. That just is not true. It was part of a package deal and was mostly symbolic. Apple had a few billion at the time actually, and a few months before had raised money by bond issues. If you can’t get this simple fact correct, why would I believe anything else in your video is accurate?
I was working on a proposal project at Boeing. One of the young engineers pitched to the Chief Engineer that he could fire the word processing and half the graphics team if they bought 10 Macs with Word and Excel. He said he'd train people how to use them on our lunch hour, and he did. Excel was vastly superior to 123 especially due to the "preview" feature on charts with the WSIWYG interface. With 123 you had to embed a bunch of codes to add labels, grid lines etc..Most people had to print several charts in 123 to finally get it right, whereas with a Mac you would only need to print one time. After the proposal, which we won, I justified my own Mac strictly based on Word and Excel functionality. It was my first dedicated computer in a long career. BTW: when Windows finally added Networking we all switched to that platform. Haven't used a Mac since.