this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
59 points (94.0% liked)

Technology

59132 readers
3250 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
59
The Rise of Excel Part 1 (www.youtube.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/1047745

Excel is practically synonymous with the word "spreadsheet" today, and has attained near ubiquity in the workplace and home. But it wasn't always the reigning champion of the spreadsheet market.

In fact, Excel started out as a Macintosh exclusive, with Gates and Microsoft hoping that Excel could build a commanding position on the Macintosh, and then use that as a foothold to attack the dominant spreadsheet champion of the 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3. The Macintosh was in dire need of a killer app that could do for it, what VisiCalc had done for the Apple II years prior.

But could Excel be that app?

This is the story of how the world's most dominant spreadsheet was developed for the flailing Macintosh, a computer with a fraction of the market share of the then standard MS-DOS PC, from which humble position Excel began its long climb to total dominance.

#spreadsheet #excel #documentary

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Learns Lotus 1-2-3 and BASIC Programming in school

The future ends up using Excel and Python

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Code failed successfully.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It was kinda funny as in the early to mid 90's I would be crazy to do a science lab on anything but a mac which had the easiest to use graphing and such. then corporate wise lotus123 was just entrenched by the late 90's but then the very late 90's into 2000 office just took over. maybe coinciding with win 95 becoming dominant. At least that is how it felt to me at the time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are they so different that you could not move from one to the other?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The spreadsheet programs, yes, once you've learned one you've learned them all, but I highly recommend anyone learning programming to avoid BASIC entirely just because horrible coding practices are basically baked into the language and the syntax is so dissimilar from anything else out there. There were a lot of things I had to "unlearn" when I got into C and C++.