this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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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

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[–] [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++.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I really like Another Boring Topic. Their videos tend to be well-researched and in-depth, and are clearly things they’re interested in (ie not clickbait). Since content creation isn’t their day job the release schedule is pretty random, but it’s always worth the wait!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=PI23HAEN63c

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which genre is it? Romance, Drama, Disaster movie, Horror?

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