Dan Bricklin

Daniel S. Bricklin (born July 15, 1951 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , USA ) developed the first software for spreadsheets in 1979 together with Bob Frankston . Visicalc ran on Apple II computers and contributed significantly to their success.

Life

Daniel Bricklin gained his first programming experience while at school at the Akiba Hebrew Academy . In 1973 he did his bachelor's degree at MIT , one of the leading universities in the technical field. There he met Bob Frankston. After graduating, he worked at DEC on the word processing program WPS-8 , which was one of the first of its kind to be developed for a PDP-8 . He received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1979 . He had the idea for a spreadsheet program there . Together with Frankston he developed a program that he later called Visicalc . Together they founded the company Software Arts . Dan Bricklin received the Grace Murray Hopper Award for Visicalc in 1981 . Bricklin left the company in 1985 and founded Software Garden . There he developed a program for prototyping and simulating software. With this he won the Software Publishers Association Award in 1986 for the best programming tool and in 1987 again for a new version of the program. He also designed the PageGarden program for laser printers.

In 1990 he founded the software company Slate Corporation with others . They mainly dealt with software for tablet PCs , but had to close the company after four years because business was not going well. Bricklin went back to Software Garden and developed the OverAll Viewer , a product to graphically display data and a program to demonstrate software on Microsoft Windows . In 1995 he started a new company: Trellix Corporation . This dealt with website creation technologies and website hosting . A well-known product is Trellix Web , which has been used on approximately 35 million devices. The company was bought by Interland, Inc. (now Web.com ), a major provider of hosting solutions.

Bricklin is also said to have coined the term friend-to-friend networking for a kind of anonymous P2P network and received the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award in 2003 as a leader in technology changes .

Dan Bricklin is currently working on a web program called wikiCalc , which enables spreadsheets to be run on the network via a wiki-like interface . Version 1.0 was published in January 2007.

In January 2017, Bricklin published a lecture on the history of Visicalc on TED .

Web links

Bricklins website (English)

Trellix - a web hosting company he founded

Software Garden - one he founded software company (English)

A Robert Cringely interview (English)

In regard to the invention of the electronic spreadsheet on the website of Harvard Business School (English)

Bricklin's TED talk about his career and the creation of Visicalc (English, German subtitles available)

Individual evidence

^ Dan Bricklin: Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet. Retrieved January 16, 2017 .

personal data
SURNAME	Bricklin, Dan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Bricklin, Daniel S.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH	July 15, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH	Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , USA

[1] Dan Bricklin: Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet. Retrieved January 16, 2017 .