I was in the middle of responding to an email and I used Visicalc as an example to make a point (remember Visicalc?). I couldn’t remember how to spell Bob Frankston’s last name (I’ve been friends with Dan Bricklin, the co-investor of Visicalc since I lived in Boston – but I’ve never met or talked to Bob) so I did a quick Google search on Visicalc.
I hit the jackpot. Dan has a copy of Visicalc that you can run on a PC. I downloaded it and three minutes later I was staring at the Visicalc screen from my childhood (the first time I ran Visicalc was when I was 13). The MS-DOS version is 27,520 BYTES. That’s 27k. Not 27MB. 27k. Smaller than most GIFs and JPEGs.
I poked around on Dan and Bob’s sites. Dan has a bunch of great stuff on his site (hey Dan – your hair isn’t gray). Bob has some long essays on it on his site.
Amy (my wife – who still pines away for the days of Lotus Agenda) just walked in and – after seeing Visicalc up on my screen – said “What was wrong with DOS anyway – wasn’t it good enough – at least I could find all of my files.”
Dan / Bob (who I still don’t know, but feel a special character-based and forward slash bond to) – thanks for the memory. / S Q Y.