Yeah very simple, but cool nonetheless.

Mamboooo no. #5

Anyone know what kind of departments/parts of business were the first adopters of visicalc?

All kinds of operational departments. I'm sure it was used for accounting, payroll and commissions, inventory tracking, I know that teachers used it for gradebooks as I helped set them up when I was in high school (early 1980s).

Pretty much anything that you used to do on paper with a columnar notebook or worksheet and a calculator, or anything that could be represented in tabular form could probably be implemented in VisiCalc, Lotus 123, and others. Spreadsheets are probably the most successful software application that was ever invented. Certainly one of the most.

Accountants, and individuals within all kinds of businesses (what we today would call shadow IT). Imagine something like this:

* Person who deals with numbers all day goes to a computer store to browse.

* He sees VisiCalc, and immediately understands what it can do. It *blows his mind*.

* He wants to buy it right away. Pays for $2000 Apple II computer with disk drives to run $100 software; price is no object.

* Shows friends and colleagues.

* They rush to computer store. Repeat.

One of my most vivid memories from childhood was being in a computer store which sold Apple ][s when a gentleman drove up in an (awesome) black Trans Am and declared to the salesperson, "I want a Visicalc" --- after explaining that it was a computer application and that the potential customer didn't have an Apple, the salesperson proceeded to put together pretty much my dream machine (at the time), an Apple ][ w/ dual-disk drives and 80 col. card and green display and 132 col. dot matrix printer, and of course, a copy of Visicalc.

After paying by writing out a check, I helped load everything into his car and he drove off into the sunset --- I was then allowed to choose a reformatted disk from the box as a reward and chose _The Softporn Adventure_ (which I then stupidly removed the label from, but it wasn't something I wanted to explain to my parents...).

I would guess anybody doing bookkeeping or accounting.

Back then it was common for people to buy a whole system for their requirements. Hardware and software.

Software was often more expensive than the computer - and sometimes by far!

Managers loved spreadsheets more than the accountants I feel, being able to fiddle numbers and see what changed was, well, a game changer.

Facts

can you expand on your workflow?

2027

I took inspiration from (https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osec/osec20250812), which mentions: "Demand-Driven Strategies: Expand proven work-based learning models like Registered Apprenticeships and align education programs to career pathways in priority industries to ensure direct connections to employer needs."

I was surprised to find this coming from the current admin for sure...

Thank you for the kind words!

Let me guess, you’ve never tried them? This is the one substance no one should be talking about if you’ve never tried it. You can’t reason your way through it with first principles.