The First Killer App: A History of Spreadsheets

摘要

The CHI literature includes few studies of applications such as spreadsheets and databases that are used more in business than by consumers and researchers. However, the spreadsheet inspired many early proponents 0f user-centered design. Melissa Rodriguez Zynda recounts its emergence and evolution. If we said that the history of spreadsheets was in many ways inextricably linked with the history of personal computing, we would not be the first. Products such as VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Multiplan paved the way for computing without coding, bringing the power of computing to non-programmers at a time when few applications did so. Spreadsheets do not teach their users how to code or how to understand programming; rather, they allow the user to be "actively engaged with the spreadsheet table as a problem-solving device throughout the process of model building," without requiring low-level programming knowledge.