Dan Bricklin

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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

Individual evidence

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