What does VC stand for?

They wrote simple Visicalc spreadsheets that allowed farmers to calculate the optimum number of sheep or cattle to cull.

There's IBM's original FORTRAN team from the 1950s, who first taught computers to scientists who weren't necessarily computer scientists; there's the pair of almost unthinkably productive researchers at Bell Labs in the early 1970s who threw together the robust tools of the Unix operating system in a series of lightning-fast inspirations; there are all the intellectual parents (mostly fathers, some mothers) of BASIC, C++, the Mac interface, the SQL database, and the Visicalc spreadsheet, all the way through to James Gosling's invention of Java in the 1990s.

Come with me on a visit to the VisiCalc history site and see for yourself.

For those too young to remember the dawning of the PC age in the late '70s and early '80s, VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet app for personal computers, and credited with turning the PC from an expensive toy into a serious business tool.

As far back as the days of VisiCalc, software developers and software marketers have struggled to find a business model that fairly allocates money, control, and risk.

He is best known for co-developing VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, and is a founding trustee of the Massachusetts Software Council.

The launch of VisiCalc in 1979 represented a significant breakthrough for the computer industry, with the electronic spreadsheet emerging as the first product of its kind to run on the personal computer.

In addition, the Council, along with the Software History Center, will pay a special tribute to Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to mark the 25th anniversary of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet for the personal computer.