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VisiCalc Reconstructed

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Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#71

Post by bombcar »

SoftTalker wrote: post #35
gregates wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since the formulas did depend on each other the order of (re)calculation made a difference. The first idea was to follow the dependency chains but this would have involved keeping pointers and that would take up memory. We realized that normal spreadsheets were simple and could be calculated in either row or column order and errors would usually become obvious right away. Later spreadsheets touted "natural order" a…

Even LaTeX just brute-forces dependencies such as building a table of contents, index, and footnote references by running it a few times until everything stabilizes.

It is possible (though very rare) to get a situation in LaTeX where it keeps oscillating between two possible “solutions” - usually forcing a hbox width will stabilize it.

Or do what everyone does and reword something ;)

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#72

Post by bombcar »

zie wrote: post #8
bonsai_spool wrote: post #2

Are there good command-line interfaces for spreadsheets? I don't do anything super financially-important and I'd prefer to stay in the terminal for quick editing of things, especially if I can have Vi keybindings.

There is SC and now sc-im: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im You can also literally run Lotus 123 if you want. Someone has binaries to make it work on linux. or under dosemu

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#73

Post by bombcar »

somat wrote: post #49
hunter4309 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visidata[0] is a killer data swiss army knife. It's even inspired off Visicalc [0] https://www.visidata.org/

It's weird but visidata is my favorite spreadsheet. "But... visidata is not a spreadsheet" I know, that's what makes it so weird. On contemplation, I think I grew dissatisfied with the normal spreadsheet data model, I wanted something bettered structured than the "it's a big bag of cells" that spreadsheets present, I wanted row security. The best I found was the relational database. I currently use a local postgres d…

Microsoft access was always a moderately mediocre database but it was also always an amazing spreadsheet for so many use cases.

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#74

Post by bombcar »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #30
breadsniffer wrote: post #16

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

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.

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#75

Post by airstrike »

izacus wrote: post #67
airstrike wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't dismiss Visicalc at all. In fact, I even said it had fantastic success. I dismissed the article's claim that maintaining a dependency graph is overkill for a spreadsheet. That's a false statement. It might have been true at the time, but it's not true today. The phrase as written in TFA is poor form and misleading to beginners.

[flagged]

Few things are more arrogant than telling someone you're teaching them a lesson...

This is a product from 1979! It does not prove me wrong at all. Trade offs are different today. Decisions that applied then don't apply now. The quoted text from TFA is wrong and simplistic.

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#76

Post by fsckboy »

gregates wrote: post #36
SoftTalker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even LaTeX just brute-forces dependencies such as building a table of contents, index, and footnote references by running it a few times until everything stabilizes.

VisiCalc didn't do this, though. It just recalculated once, and if there were errors you had to notice them and manually trigger another recalc.

but wasn't it documented to do it in some sort of "down and to the right" order, and if you wrote your formulas "up and to the left" everything would be hunky dory?

tables generally have row and column sums, subtotals, and averages down and to the right.

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#77

Post by fsckboy »

airstrike wrote: post #23
OliverM wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the existence & success of visicalc a direct counter to this?

Is anyone using visicalc today? I'm not sure how its past success, however fantastic, can be translated into "a dependency graph is often an overkill for a spreadsheet"

visicalc was rewriten in the 80's for computers newer than the apple ][, so are you asking specifically about the original implementation or later implementations? it makes a difference and mostly disobviates the question.

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#78

Post by staplung »

Cool article but I think the write-up no longer matches the actual code. Snippets in the article use `*p->p` a lot. The *p is a parser struct defined above as

  struct parser {
    const char* s;
    int pos;
    struct grid* g;
  };
Notice there is no `p` member within. Assume the author meant `*p->pos`? And indeed if you look at the code in github the parser struct is defined as

  struct parser {
    const char *s, *p;
    struct grid* g;
  };
So there's the missing `p`, even though it's no longer an int. So I presume the member variable was once known as `pos` but got renamed at some point. Some of the snippets did not get updated to match.

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#79

Post by somat »

pstuart wrote: post #33

Other open source command line spreadsheets: https://github.com/drclcomputers/GoSheet https://github.com/xi/spreadsheet/ https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im https://github.com/saulpw/visidata https://github.com/bgreenwell/xleak https://github.com/SamuelSchlesinger/tshts https://github.com/CodeOne45/vex-tui

If we are doing a survey, you missed one of the most interesting ones

teapot https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/

Re: VisiCalc Reconstructed

#80

Post by zie »

bombcar wrote: post #72
zie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is SC and now sc-im: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im You can also literally run Lotus 123 if you want. Someone has binaries to make it work on linux. or under dosemu

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html

Awesome sauce! I was too lazy to track this down, thanks for sharing! (for readers not following, this is Lotus 123 on Linux)
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