It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, if you were an accountant, you might have used big paper ledgers. But most people simply scribbled their math on note paper or, perhaps, an engineering pad.

[Christopher Drum] wanted to explore what the state of the art in 1978 spreadsheet technology could do, so he ran VisiCalc—the first widely used spreadsheet program. Surprisingly, VisiCalc got a lot of things right that we still use today.

One feature that has mostly disappeared is the text-based menu. As [Christopher] describes, when you press the slash key, “what first appears to be ‘the entire alphabet’ pops up at the top of the screen.” In reality, this is a menu of letters, each corresponding to a specific command. For example, pressing **C** will clear the sheet, but not before prompting you for confirmation.

Another interesting aspect of VisiCalc is how it handled formula evaluation. Unlike modern spreadsheets, it did not use a natural order of calculation. Instead, it processed cells by row or by column—whichever you chose. This meant that if cell A1 depended on the value in cell B5, you would likely get an incorrect result, since A1 would always be computed before B5.

Keyboard controls were also very different back then. The original Apple computer did not have up and down arrow keys, so you had to toggle the functions of the left and right keys using the space bar. Different times indeed!

This look back offers a fascinating glimpse into a very influential piece of software and its tutorials. If you happen to have old VisiCalc files and want to bring them into the 21st century, [Christopher] also explains the rather convoluted process to convert them—mostly successfully.

VisiCalc remains a remarkable milestone in spreadsheet history, and these insights help us appreciate just how far spreadsheet software has come.
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/26/spreadsheets-apple-style/