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Archive 1Archive 2

Pardo

Tweaked things a bit to give a little more detail to the Pardo claim. Simply stating that they were inventors of the spreadsheet and Bricklin a "reinventor" seemed facile and a bit deceptive. The Pardo case probably ought to be mentioned on the "Software Patent" page eventually, too. --204.38.148.67 13:44, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sources?

What are the sources for the reports referred to in the paragraph beginning, "Educational research supports the use of spreadsheets both in K-12 and teacher education and in professional development"? --Claudine 02:00, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Picture?

Having a picture of a spreadsheet would be quite nice. Just my humble opinion.Its like a chinese takeaway, the gits dont understand you, you dont understand them! 80.219.15.170 06:45, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There is a nice picture now :-) --220.253.22.122 11:08, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism

I have just reverted a lot of vandalism on this article. More editors need to put this on their watchlists as there is a vandal who keeps removing sections from it. NSR (talk) 12:38, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

yes there has.There's no obvious cause.its just minor recreational vandalism rather than some concerted effort. If it can be kept under control,then its really good. Anoopnair2050 (talk) 13:23, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Rewrite

This is actually a pretty bad article. I may try to do some work on it.

It seems large sections of the article are also ripped [1]. I think I will try to beat this into shape later tonight, I kind of enjoy making messed up articles work again. :) -- Foofy 21:45, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks to all the editors, this article is much better now than what it was a couple of months ago; keep up the good work! 131.111.8.96 20:22, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
Sarcasm? :P I know, I know, I said I'd help, and haven't done anything yet. I'll make a fresh effort this week. --Foofy 21:24, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Further on Rewrite

This does indeed need a rewrite. The first paragraph relating a spreadsheet to newpaper spreads is off the mark. The term relates to the accountant's grand work sheet which was referred to as the spreadsheet.

This dates from the days when accounting was primarily a manual computational occupation. Information was stored manually in handwriting in many journals or ledgers. When doing a balance for a period it was difficult to access all the relevant information by going back and forth to these sources. The solution was a spreadsheet on which all these source could be copied for proper reference and computation. The spreadsheet was considered a ~work~ sheet and errors and erasures were expected. This is NOT the case for entries in a journal or ledger. (Significant changes in a journal or ledger was a cause for concern.) Upon completing such a spreadsheet the accountant would turn to the task of posting all the outcomes of the spreadsheet and creating a summary sheet of the these outcomes.

I am not an accountant and so my jargon and description might not be accurate in minute detail. I did take accounting 101 in about 1960 and that's how it was taught and done then. I suggest that the etymology of spreadsheet be struck unless it can be verified as accurate.

A little further commentary...

I suggest doing the organization of the article portion on history a little differently. I suggest doing the history as a history of the development of ~features~ of the spreadsheet program and separate out the marketing, legal, and other issues of the products. For example, saying that VisiCalc made no successful answer to 123 belies the history and ignores the legal issues that led to the company's troubles. These things are irrelevant to the topic spreadsheet, IMO. They are relevant to the history of the market struggle between various companies' competing products.

More relevant was that early spreadsheet had limitations on labels, number formats, editability, number of rows, number of columns, and such-like limitations. There were no functions to speak of. The sparse matrix array was a break through yet to be found. These kinds of issues in the history would be more appropriate to the history than the product and market struggles. Three-D, pivot tables, lookup tables, and charting from table data would be more relevant historically. Begs 19:46, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Shuan, why did you add links to articles that don't exist? -- Foofy 22:28, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Spreadsheet Program File Formats

I am interested in reading an article about the various spreadsheet document file formats. For example, Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program and its file format appends the extension ".xls" to its respective file names. Other programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 also have their formats. In comparison to word processing documents, there are programs with their own standards. Microsoft Word for example appends ".doc" to its files and has a format that corresponds to it. WordPerfect uses its own system, and so on. Within the "word processing" realm, there are these special formats for individual programs, but there are also additional formats which could be interpreted as being "universal" such as plain text files ".txt" and Rich Text Format ".rtf" which can work on any word processor. Is there (or are there) similar "standard" formats which can be universally used between spreadsheet programs as there seems to be for word processing programs? If so, it would be nice to have it mentioned either in this article, or in another article on this topic. I am completely clueless on the topic, so I don't even know where to start other than by placing this comment on this discussion board. -- Michael Karazim 2006-01-06 01:52:46 UTC

Suggest looking into the comma seperated or tab delimitted formats192.189.236.20 16:48, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
The problem is the dependency of cells on formulas/functions, for which you would have a hard time coming up with a "standard". Otherwise, just the cell-data itself is indeed reliably transfered in either comma- or tab-delimited format. 209.92.136.131 16:54, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
Excel can save spreadsheets in XML format; and OpenOfficeOrg saves its files in a zipped XML format. MeekMark 02:09, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

The list disease

Whats with the enormous list of Spreadsheet apps? More than half link to articles that don't exist. --Foofy 04:13, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

I've nuked the list because there's already a link to a seperate one. --Foofy 04:16, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Shortcomings

There seems to be a growing backlash against spreadsheets lately. See Phillip Howard's article Managing Spreadsheets for an example. In the interest of balance, I figured some of the shortcomings of spreadsheets should be mentioned in this article. Thalter 16:08, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure some of these shortcomings don't apply to all spreadsheet apps. I know Actuate has some products that solve these problems. --Foofy 18:13, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Earlier in 2008 I added what is now the opening of this section that introduces four main shortcomings: reliability, expressiveness, collaboration, and productivity. Someone removed collaboration, and I would like to discuss why this should be removed. Good collaboration features do not alter the root problem that collaboration at the level of cell formulas is hard. A small survey I conducted indicates that almost all spreadsheets have a single dominant author of the formulas, although it is common for many people to edit data and to use the same spreadsheet. Rjpetti1 (talk) 12:37, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Screenshot substitution.

I am changing the screenshot from MS Excel to OpenOffice.org. The reason is twofold:

Firstly, under the fair use licensing tag of the MS Word image, it states that the image may be used for identification of and critical commentary on the software in question. Using the image to illustrate and example of a type of software does not meet the stated requirement.

Secondly, according to Wikipedia's fair use policy, fair use images shouldn't be used where free alternatives are available.

-Seidenstud 04:02, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

That is incredibly pendanic.
That's a good idea, but I think the image you replaced it with is also "fair use". It has Mac OS X graphics in it. - James Foster 11:19, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Turing complete?

Does anyone have a citation for this? It's a pretty provacative claim; the article doesn't go into detail (and neither does Turing completeness) and I'd be interested in reading more. I'm thinking that the typical spreadsheet would have difficulty achieving Turing completeness since formulas can't update state (i.e. change the values of other cells) -- wouldn't this be necessary to simulate a Turing machine? Tmdean 21:04, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I thought about this some more, and I can see now how you could simulate a TM with a spreadsheet. I made a simple mock-up of the idea here: [2]. I'm not sure if I would consider spreadsheets Turing-complete because user intervention is required if not enough tape or iterations are represented in the worksheet, but I can understand one someone might make the argument for Turing-completeness. Tmdean 04:34, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

From the article: "Most spreadsheets allow iterative recalculation in the presence of these cyclic dependencies, which can be either directly controlled by a user or which stop when threshold conditions are reached." I've been Googling as hard as I can and I can't find any information on using cyclic dependencies in this way. Does anyone have a citation? Looks like this passage has been in the article since the begining. Tmdean 05:44, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I think merely the spreadsheet cannot be considered as Turing Complete. Nearly all spreadsheets have recalculation limits. Recalculation controlled by a user is NOT part of a "computation". As a result, a spreadsheet can only manage a finite amount of data (number of cells times maximum number of recalculations). Hence, there is no way a Turing machine of arbitrary size can be reduced to a spreadsheet. Since Wikipedia is not a place for original research, such a bold claim without citation should be removed. --Alan Tam 11:14, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I've removed the passages in question from this page and from Turing completeness. If anyone has any citation on using cyclic dependencies to achieve iteration in spreadsheets I'd definitely like to hear about it -- but unfortunately I can't seem to find any relevent information on anything related to this sort of thing. Of course, you have to give some leeway and consider more of a theoretical model of a spreadsheet rather than a real-world implementation when considering Turing-completeness. Any implementation of any programming language is actually not Turing-complete (of course) because of the limit on memory. Tmdean 23:24, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

screenshot

The current screenshot (showing OO calc on mac) is fine in its way, but I am still not entirely happy with it. The main problem is that the current screenshot does not show what spreadsheets are about. It shows what you can do on OO calc -- put graphics, pictures, insert dates, times, numbers in different format etc., but it just looks like a random collecton of objects/random numbers placed at random on a rectangular grid. You don't know what these numbers are, what is the graph (the labels just say "row 2", "row 20" etc.), and what the pretty picture and the dates etc. are supposed to mean. Someone should upload a screenshot showing what you can actually do on a spreadsheet -- for example a calculation of expenses, or salaries, or something like that, that would be understandable to a general reader and would show the practical side of spreadsheets. 131.111.8.97 16:13, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Using a screenshot I created. Emily 20:44, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! That is indeed better!! -- 131.111.8.99 22:12, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

"Works Records System"

The history section was pruned for a complete lack of external citations supporting the claims of the text. The information was just re-added, again without citation. While I am sure this information is probably true, it has to be backed up with solid references per Wikipedia's core policies (specifically WP:V). Please add them asap. Thanks! Kuru talk 02:50, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

  • The Works Record System information has been edited back into the article, apparently by the creator of the Works Record System. This is a Non-Neutral Point of View issue, and I believe it also gives undue weight to a particular product. --Lizzard 20:28, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
  • The Works records system has been defunct for around 6/7 years now and the article can hardly therefore be described as "an advertisement" since it was never even sold commercially. There seems to be a distinct desire to erase this technology out of existence because it does not meet the criteria of the generally recognized history. In my view, the article treats the later commercial products with kid gloves - as far as innovation goes.

How can you give "undue weight" to the FIRST ever WYSIWYG interactive spreadsheet that also happens to predate the current frantic efforts to create the best Web-based, shareable spreadsheet such as Google, Editgrid and Wikicalc - to name but three?ken 16:53, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

The text for this section was lifted (with minor changes) from my weblog without permission. Nevertheless, I'll let it stand. I hereby grant Wikipedia permission to use that section of text.

I would note, however, that my weblog article was written entirely from my personal remembrances and IMO is not up to the "reliable source" standards of Wikipedia. If it was, I would have included it in the Wikipedia article myself. Doug Pardee 22:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

A question out of curiosity: what's the URL of your blog? --Pkchan 02:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

fix it so i can understand it!!!!

Dan Bricklin's blog post about this page

I posted some comments about the current state of this page on my blog. To try to keep in the spirit of Wikipedia guidelines, I'll start with just having my comment there. See Issues with the Wikipedia "spreadsheet" page, June 6, 2007. Good luck raising the level of this page to an "A"! I hope I helped get the participation necessary. --Dan Bricklin, 6 June 2007 2:39EDT

  • Dan, I added a POV-check request to the page, to ask for an experienced admin to take a look. I think a key issue to address here is "undue weight" as well as Neutral POV. --Lizzard 20:31, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Dan, getting involved on this talk page is a great way to start, as you have raised some valid points. There will be a lot of related articles were you can jump right in and improve the articles, but it is worth avoiding conflict of interests on this article. Wikipedia has a lot of avenues available for editors to use in order to avoid COI. If all else fails, blog again and people will take notice :-)
In regards to the undue weight given to "Works Records System" on this article, my guess is that it is because VisiCalc has its own article, whereas the ICI program lacks sources/notability/whatever to warrant its own article. As a result, the sole online record of its existence has been dumped here. This is an example of the problem you mention in your blog; the technical papers were heavily protected and in many cases the interested parties have since gone out of business, taking their copyrights with them. It is also a period where the published material is mostly on storage equipment nobody really wants to access.
It would be great if we can find sufficient sources to create a distinct article for the ICI program, so it can be mentioned briefly on 'Spreadsheet' as merely a predecessor. Over on Talk:Brunner Mond I've asked whether that is the company that developed the software. Ken Dakin is, according to the WP article, one of the key people that was involved in the Works Records System, but there are no sources on that article either. Based on google searches, I am unsure that the ICI program is even notable. More research required. John Vandenberg 08:54, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
John: The VisiCalc article does not cover the product either. Someone else there has made that page mainly a place to talk about his work along with unsubstantiated (and to my mind, false) claims. I have made extensive comments there on the discussion page. DanBricklin 04:36, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Dan: Out of respect for you, your product and your infamy, I specifically did not suggest that you were not the inventor of the first commercial spreadsheet. If you look at my first addition of the Works Records System "product" (WRS) to the spreadsheet article, you will see that I merely altered your product description to reflect the fact that it was the first commercial product for the PC. In your own "history of the spreadsheet" you stated that you could not find any other product on the market which is presumably true.

Naturally you would not be expected to be aware of an "internal" implementation within even a large worldwide organization such as ICI, even though it pre-dated yours by around 6 years.

Also, I did not create the section about Visicalc and cannot be held responsible in any way for it not covering the product. I merely tried to describe what I know of the ICI system from being deeply involved in its creation.

Concerning your blog (please read: Issues with the Wikipedia "spreadsheet" page before reading these comments):

The "spreadsheetness" (if I can call it that) of what today is considered a spreadsheet was most certainly a feature of the WRS. It had rows, columns, formulas and instant re-calculations (even across multiple "workbooks" [applications]). It was built by non-programmers who only had to know the relationships between discreet "cells".

It even held historic data that "flowed" organically to larger periods.

The relative size, in words, of the WRS section of the article is more a reflection of how little someone else has written about Visicalc than a criticism of what is written about WRS. It contains more detail because I explained some of the internals such as "double precision floating point" operations, thread storage (allowing multiple users) and so on. I can hardly be blamed for not mentioning Lotus 1-2-3 or EXCEL which seems to be implied by your blog.

I also disagree that formatting is necessarily "one of the most important aspects of spreadsheets" or has anything particularly to do with Fortran or COBOL as such.

In my opinion, the most important things are:-

  • 4GL "non-programmer" capability
  • Scratchpad capability
  • "instant" automatic re-calculation
  • variety & scope of functions
  • ability to link spreadsheets from different sources.
  • Fast error detection/ instant visual debugging / lack of compile turnaround.
  • automatic protection of formulae from accidental overwrite.
  • automatic storage of aged data.

Just-in-time compilation is described by you as "modern" suggesting that the WRS didn't use that concept which it most certainly did. Contrary to what is in your blog, in my view, the article DOES explain the technique in sufficient detail at least for a Wikipedia article - what do you want - the assembly instructions?

As for the 3270 reference, it seems muddled - what is this "article for the 3270". Why does allowing cells to be defined anywhere on the screen stop it becoming a spreadsheet? Do named cell references in EXCEL (as opposed to R/C refs.) stop it being a spreadsheet if the results (formulae) are not in rows or columns?

How many "other products" were there before or after the WRS (for 6 years!) where the article could be "ignoring so many others"... "giving a false impression to the computer industry".

What possible justification can you have for stating "It was not a full implementation of what we would call a spreadsheet (nor even a subset implementation)....".

In fact it did much much MORE than Visicalc in it's very first implementation.

It is indeed true that there is no UI shown and only one screenshot in the section about WRS - but if I had added more this would have made the article even longer - and it has already been criticized for being "too long" in comparison with others including Visicalc! In any case, the equivalent screenshot of Visicalc shows virtually nothing except column and row numbers!

If you really want a copy of the 1974 manual, you can have one (at least one of the volumes which is all I have!).

What saddens me Dan, is that it seems to me that you are, in reality, objecting out of a feeling "sour grapes" - of no longer being viewed as the de facto "inventor" of the first interactive WYSIWYG spreadsheet. That honour undoubtedly goes to Robert Mais in my view. Yours is rightly commercializing it first for the PC.

  • John:

The WORKS RECORDS SYSTEM did exist and no, I did NOT claim that I designed it; merely being part of the team that programmed and implemented it - as it states to this day in the current version. The real credit goes to Robert Mais of ICI who envisioned the concept back in the early 1970's.

As far as trying to suggest that the WORKS RECORDS SYSTEM was not WYSIWYG, not an interactive spreadsheet and furthermore not "even notable" goes, this is pure impudence. It was, in fact, everything it says in the article.

ICI have not gone "out of business" and I have copies of the original technical documentation, Robert Mais is still alive and kicking and has the original manual - Wikipedia is not the correct forum to "dump" proofs of existence willy-nilly onto cyberspace, otherwise I might already have scanned in the complete document as part of the article.

It is somewhat churlish to state that the system can, "if sufficient sources can be found",,, "be mentioned briefly" as a mere "predecessor" - considering it was, in fact, most certainly the first WYSIWIG, interactive and shareable spreadsheet in the truest sense and had many features which are still lacking, even in the latest versions of EXCEL!

It is interesting to note that you think that a Google search is the be all and end all of investigative research and that not finding any evidence of the ICI system (on Google) makes it "not notable"!

There must be many millions of instances of "things that are not found on Google" that nevertheless exist or existed once.

The quality of debate on Wikipedia often leaves much to be desired I am afraid.

The rigorous insistence of "no original research" surely holds true for someone who didn't need to research it - I lived it and breathed it. To bury it in the sands of time would be grossly unfair to the originator just because no one wrote a book about it or made a "song and dance" about a functional product that never went "on sale" but performed a useful function for 27 years for a major international corporation.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.144.53.87 (talk • contribs) 16:21, 12 June 2007

Ken (you neglected to post this logged in or sign it above, only in the revisions comment, but I assume it's you),

As I said in my blog post, there is an issue with what is a "spreadsheet", what is a "WYSIWYG" spreadsheet, what is an "interactive" spreadsheet, etc., and which ones do we care to discuss in this article. There are subtleties here, and without a vigorous definition it is hard to distinguish which products are what. At the detailed level required in patent work (at least from my experience in litigation and in court, and an area you have brought up elsewhere) the products discussed are quite different and without a clear definition it is hard to know where to draw lines. Even for Wikipedia, though, we need some definition.

A lot of what people think of in a spreadsheet relates to the details and subtleties of the interaction method. It is the lack of a distinct "design phase" (something you say is part of the Works system) that makes WYSIWYG special. It is not just the "4-GL" language, being for "normal" people. In fact, it needs to not be like a "language" at all.

For example with respect to definitions, in trying to define "interactive spreadsheets" the article currently says "Earlier implementations were mainly designed around batch programs" which is not how I remember the timesharing systems of the early days -- they were not batch and they were certainly called "interactive" as defined in Wikipedia today. (I helped implement APL twice before 1974, and worked a bit on a Basic system that did incremental compilation even earlier and a LISP system. They were not batch and some of us used video displays.)

Your list of the "most important things" about a spreadsheet relate to most report generation programs, not to the development and differentiation of spreadsheets as popular tools.

The importance of formatting of numbers as a distinct element was very important -- a better version of that was one of the reasons for the initial success of Lotus 1-2-3 according to some the principals I've talked to.

The Works system may have done a lot, but not of the things that seemed to make VisiCalc and it's ilk popular and special.

As I understand it, a problem with the Works reference is precisely that there were no verifiable references to check. Wikipedia requires verification. You don't have to put it in the article (and in this case shouldn't), but you have to at least point to something that others can check. With something that is different than what is generally written (the case with your claim) the burden is higher. And, by Wikipedia standards, which I may or may not agree with, those references have to be of a certain type in certain types of publications. The VisiCalc page links to mine with scans of the documentation and an actual, running copy, but there are numerous published books describing its operation, etc. The Works system had no such references.

If I misunderstood the nature of the Works system from what you have provided (here and on the 3270 page), then that is even more proof that more sources were needed. They need to not be sent to me (my opinion does not hold special weight here on this site and I have generally tried to stay out of doing this despite repeated requests), but be accessible to the public (academic, and the development community) who want to examine a variety of products.

I mentioned the difficulty of finding other material, which is an issue for such things (as well as in patent litigation). You may not know of any other uses at other companies over the years, but I hear stories from people all the time and remember some myself, so know there are lots of systems that may or may not have fit whatever definition we come up with for spreadsheet. I brought that up in my post as a challenge to getting something that reflects history. The whole "formulas and tabular output" genre of products, as I wrote in my blog post, is one that I believe needs its own detailed history. Mixing it only with Excel-like products like VisiCalc is inappropriate (Excel is what most people today think of as a "spreadsheet", I think) and does the genre a disservice.

The sentence with "commercial product for the personal computer" could be read that the Works product was a "commercial product", which Wikipedia is currently defining as being offered for market. There was no support given for the Works product being offered for market. If we are looking at internal products, then it opens up that whole area where it is even harder to get verifiable information and give a good overview of the actual history of the time. Making your statement that WRS is the "FIRST interactive WYSIWYG spreadsheet" as opposed to "an early interactive system created within a company for creating, displaying, and modifying data displayed in rows and columns" is hard to support with any certainty no matter what the definitions.

With regard to the percentage of material, I was making a general statement about the article. You'll note that despite knowing your name, etc., I tried to keep this at the article level of how it ended up, not the personal level about individual contributions. I'm not blaming you for the balance, I was just trying to get the article to be one that looks like what you would expect in terms of an "encyclopedia overview" of a topic for people who don't know the topic already. My call was to the community to make this a clean, full, well-done article.

I routinely credit others where I think it's appropriate, despite attempts by some to credit me. It is attempts to claim the single "inventor of the first" on behalf of someone of an idea with a definition that would bring in yet more people who may better deserve that claim that bothers me. I list myself as the co-creator of VisiCalc, and VisiCalc as the first of what we now call an electronic spreadsheet. I go to great lengths to explain what I mean by that on my web site. I think my statements in that regard are quite defensible.

DanBricklin 18:29, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Kudos to Dan for maintaining a collegial attitude here, and taking the time to provide a well-reasoned response. (If you had a user page I'd leave a WP:Barnstar.) The key point here for Ken, and for any others interested in this discussion, is this: "there were no verifiable references to check" about WRS. WP:NOR and WP:V are not abstract goals, but guiding principles for contributing material to Wikipedia. What one may remember about one's own time working on an internal project like WRS simply doesn't matter. What matters is what has actually appeared in print. If you have new information to report about a system built in the past, document it to your heart's content in a book or a blog. If the rest of the world finds it sufficiently notable, it will get cited in encyclopedic resources like Wikipedia. Don't rewrite history on these pages (and don't cite your own publications).
FWIW, I also remember the computing milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dan's description sounds about right to me. I agree that there were many interesting interactive system ideas floating around then, particularly in the timesharing world, and at places like MIT, Bell labs, and of course Xerox PARC (take a look at what was being done with Smalltalk user interfaces in 1972-1980). What matters for us here, and what changed the world, is the work that became publicly known, through academic publications, trade press, and commercial products. Over a beer, I could tell you about some of the cool systems I was building in the 70s – a multiprocessing message-passing dataflow operating system for object-oriented computing, for example. Cool? Yes. Notable? No. Never published. Never sold. Too damn bad. No Wikipedia article for it.
Finally, and it pains me to say this, the current exchange has reinforced to me the frustration that thoughtful, experienced observers like User:DanBricklin and User:Dave Tuttle are essentially deterred from contributing their perspectives to Wikipedia. Sometimes they must strive against well-intentioned editors with limited perspectives. Other times we see a clash of personal agendas. At worst, they get shouted down by ill-willed flamers. Eventually, they get frustrated and return to their real work, leaving Wikipedia to the wikipediholics. Democratic editing has clear benefits; but it also is self-limiting, and may ultimately doom Wikipedia to becoming a glorified blog – glorified indeed, wide in scope, but perhaps never achieving the scholastic, literary, or historical excellence that we wish for it. Time will tell. Trevor Hanson 19:34, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Dan  : I take your point about "what is a spreadsheet" but this, to my mind, is pretty self evident to most people in the manner, for example - as you say yourself - EXCEL is invariably used to act as the current generic example of what this means. (Previously of course it would have been Visicalc or Lotus or any other currently popular product of the same ilk). To suggest otherwise is merely blurring the obvious and instant distinction of what I describe as the "spreadsheetness" of a spreadsheet. Perhaps in bygone days it might have been described as a "magic tablet" that "worked like an abacus without the beans having to be moved each time by hand". When I think about it more in fact, not a bad description!

You say it is "lack of a distinct design phase" that makes WYSIWYG special and of course you are, in a way, right about this - but only to the extent that to add a simple row or column of numbers and give a sum does not require much "design" whichever system you use. It can be done in a line of BASIC. The "scratchpad" attribute I mentioned above was intended to highlight this particular aspect of a spreadsheet - perhaps I should have spelled it out though.

The WRS I describe mentioned a "design phase" simply because it was capable of much more than just adding rows or columns and was used to collect data from other "applications" ("remote" spreadsheets) as well as "local" data relating to a particular process within a single spreadsheet. It is only now - 33 years later - that this same capability is being applied to newer web based spreadsheets in commercial products like Editgrid and others currently in development.

Just like today's spreadsheets, a non-programmer using the WRS could express the relationship between data items (cells) using mathematical formulae and was not at all like a language (except of course the formulae still required correct mathematical syntax). (All the actual programming was of course built into the design of the system and remained the same for 27 years).

The time sharing systems of the day might have "seemed" interactive but were actually mostly parallel batch processes that shared time slots (as the name implies) and almost invariably required a compiler along the way to produce object code (i.e. machine code object program needing separate execution). Some of this may have been partially transparent to (i.e. hidden from) the end user, but happened nonetheless.

You say that my list of "most important things" about a spreadsheet relate to most report generation programs and, having worked with several "report generators" of that era, cannot agree with you at all. They were distinctly batch processes, not WYSIWYG or truly interactive and none I knew of at that time were "video" based. That occured very much later. My list of course should have included "WYSIWYG & video based & interactive" but I took that as read and very much a prerequisite for any system claiming itself a spreadsheet in the sense we understand today.

On my list, an important item relates to the protection of formulae from being accidentally overwritten by "keyed in" data - still an issue today as as far as I know on most spreadsheet implementations - and not properly addressed (except by effectively manual cell locking).

My list of attributes of spreadsheets deliberately did not include "tabular" for the simple reason that the main reason for the use of Rows/columns in Visicalc, for example, was the practical one of creating a simple method of referring to a particular "cell". Once "named cells" were introduced (much later), this requirement was met, by optionally referring to the symbolic names (as in more conventional programs). Of course presenting data in columns or rows has certain obvious visual advantages too but not strictly a requirement for a spreadsheet per se.

On my list also is "automatic storage of aged data". This point has been totally ignored in your discussion because in most spreadsheet implementations it is only "solved" by repetition (via columns or rows) of both formulae and data - a source of long standing errors where the repetition is not 100% accurate. In the WRS, the time periods were in-built, self accumulating and therefore immune from these notorious repetition errors. This is another notable feature of "an early spreadsheet" along with the equally notable feature of a "units" attribute, which also helped to reduce errors (see article).

I accept your comment about how my use of the expression "commercial product for the personal computer" might be misinterpreted to suggest that the WRS was a commercial product. It was not and I will change the Wikipedia article to reflect this. I also accept your comment about my use of the description "first interactive" in this discussion - the article itself actually uses the more precise expression "first known....".

Concerning verifiable references to check, whilst it is probably true that, so far, there have been no books written about the WRS (or ever likely to be) it is somewhat circular to suggest that if I did write a "book" about the system (because I know a lot about it) and referred to it's ISBN and publisher it might stand a lttle more chance of being accepted by Wikipedians. Unfortunately of course, I would then fall foul of the other Wikipedia requirement of not being allowed to refer to self published material! No doubt the same comment would be levelled at Robert Mais, the designer, if he wrote about the WRS himself - or indeed anyone else connected with it.

Since the WRS was in continual use for 27 years at ICI at numerous chemical plants, there must have been many 1,000's of users and 100's of application builders who will still remember this system since it was still in use up until 2001. There cannot be many applications with a shelf life of 27 years (without change) and that, in itself, is "notable" and actually a refection of how versatile/adaptable the spreadsheet concept is.

89.241.1.234 09:54, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Ken,

For this discussion, I will accept your definition of a "spreadsheet" as being something like those products popularly called a spreadsheet, typified by VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Microsoft Excel. Intersecting their capabilities generally fits with much of the material in the article's Concepts section.

Without knowing the specifics of WKS I am having a hard time understanding some of your assertions. The things you say about it imply to me that it is not like the VisiCalc/Excel type of products. The fact that you keep talking about all the things that are "better" about it even makes that more likely. "Specifics" are not your general descriptions -- it would be a detailed functional description of its operation. This is something I would expect to find in a reference, such as a user's manual, that anybody could check.

The "design" of adding a column of numbers in, for example, VisiCalc, is not at all like that done by "a line of BASIC". That is precisely what is special about it.

You have not shown how WKS has a grid of cells, displayed on the screen, each referenced by its row and column, nor how one interacts with those cells. You have not shown the formula language, how they are built, etc. A key capability of a VisiCalc/Excel-like spreadsheet is the ability to "point" to other cells while entering a formula. Another is the ability to copy formulas with the relative/absolute references handled. Inserting rows or columns updates those formulas appropriately. As the article says, the spatial relationships between cells is key. The Concepts section implies that the row/column organization is key to being a spreadsheet, contrary to what you say.

Your complaints about using repeated formulas misses one of the important characteristics of a spreadsheet that, according to David Reed, led to its success. Again, this leads me to think that WKS was like the older formula-based systems and not like a VisiCalc/Excel-like spreadsheet program.

I believe you are showing a lack of knowledge of the capabilities of some other systems, which may affect your writings here. (I think I read on your Talk page "I have not monitored spreadsheet development closely enough in the past...I left the world of spreadsheets after 1974.")

For example, as I understand it, Excel, among others including various versions of Lotus 1-2-3, has been able to refer to data in other sheets in other files, as well as data in applications, data bases, etc. Whole software businesses have been built around products that make use of these capabilities. We even had a version of VisiCalc on the Apple II in the labs that automatically picked up the latest stock prices from Dow Jones as you were using it.

Timesharing systems (especially those not from IBM) of the 1960's and early 1970's were not "parallel batch processes" -- they interacted directly and repeatedly with the user during execution, meeting the definition Wikipedia is using for interactive: "In computer science, interactive refers to software which accepts and responds to input from humans...noninteractive programs operate without human contact; examples of these include compilers and batch processing applications." You must be unaware of the internals of the systems I mention, such as the interactive Basic system and LISP systems running on Multics, DEC, and other systems. If most of your experience was on IBM systems, then you may not have been exposed to all that was going on.

A list of "important attributes" of spreadsheets shouldn't be a list of features they should have. It should primarily be the attributes that distinguish the class of products from others and secondarily within the class.

I still think that the WKS section as written should be removed from the article. The entire pre-VisiCalc part needs to be improved with a more complete description of the formula-based systems, including the most popular commercial products like, I believe, IFPS and others. If we can find verifiable material to check (which should include written documentation, which you have for WKS), then describing non-commercial products may be interesting. I have heard of very interesting systems developed by IBM and perhaps HP in the labs but not commercialized, but have not references on them.

DanBricklin

I'll jump in once more here. Ken states: "Concerning verifiable references to check...it is probably true that, so far, there have been no books written about the WRS (or ever likely to be)... [but] there must have been many 1,000's of users...who will still remember this system...and that, in itself, is 'notable'." No, sorry Ken. That is not a sufficient basis for a Wikipedia article. Read WP:V about the fundamental requirement for objective verifiability from reliable sources. Given that requirement, this debate between you and Dan about WRS characteristics is irrelevant. Even if all you claim were true, without published sources it simply does not belong here.
You also lament: "It is somewhat circular to suggest that if I did write a "book" about the system...it might stand a lttle more chance of being accepted by Wikipedians... [except for] not being allowed to refer to self published material!" This is a burden all Wikipedia editors must face and accept. It is a nonnegotiable requirement, placed on all contributions. Nobody said it would be easy to publish a book and get it noticed by somebody to cite on Wikipedia. But don't you see that's exactly what Dan did by posting his comments on his own blog, rather than changing the article here? And it's how thousands of other Wikipedia editors deal with the situation.
Based on your own agreement that "there have been no books written about the WRS" I believe that all the WRS material should be removed from the spreadsheet article. If necessary we can make a request for arbitration, but material without verifiable sources MUST be removed; there is no alternative.
I strongly suggest you set up a blog or website about the history of WRS and put all this content there. Your personal recollections and viewpoints are of interest, and should not just be discarded. However, they don't belong here. Trevor Hanson 16:52, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Trevor

Thank you for pointing out (perhaps unintentionally) the total illogicality of the rule you are invoking here. I can "publish" my genuine description of a genuine product in a Web page (without the advantages of a Wiki for critical editing by the World) and then it is OK to refer to it legitimately in a Wiki (and thats how Dan gets round it! baloney!)

Does Mein Kampf make Hitler's work any more "legitimate" for inclusion - I think not - but strangely it is an article nonetheless. How about Stalin, Pol pot and others too numerous to mention.

Please, this is childish nonsense. If a Wiki has any merit at all it is that stuff can be added to balance the bias that can result from a single point of view. Naturally that too can be challenged and eventually an article will settle down to encompass perhaps several points of view - that certainly seems to be what the goal is.

You have made me finally give up on Wikipedia editing, having had most, if not all of my contributions - "thrown out" previously because they too differed from the status quo.

If I dare to continue with this discussion, you are essentially saying that it will be deleted regardless of what I demonstrate. Then, despite my best efforts to persuade Dan Bricklin et al that there was a very spreadsheet-like product in existence long before Visicalc and running on a mainframe (of all things!), without showing the nuts & bolts he won't believe me and - even if I do and he accepts it - all knowledge of it will be lost in cyberspace unless I self publish my own blog about the product.

Clearly what is needed - it seems - is a Wikipedia.alt with links from the genuine article "at a single mouse click" to get other peoples POV on a perticular topic/article. Anyone interested in setting one up - I have the first article "spreadsheet.alt"!!!

Don't all rush at once though! signing off! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kdakin (talk • contribs) 19:37, 13 June 2007


Ken, if you're still looking at this...you might enjoy the Uncyclopedia [3].
Oops, I forgot: antiwikpedia and wikitruth. Trevor Hanson 04:56, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
It's unfortunate if you're taking any of this as an attempt to stifle contrarian viewpoints. But please realize, the point of Wikipedia is NOT to be a discussion ground for topics like the history of spreadsheets. It is NOT a place to try to convince Dan Bricklin of anything, other than of what can be found in the published record. Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, based on published sources. We avoid single-point-of-view biases specifically by using what has been published as the 'gold standard'. Anything that has never been published is, by definition, original research.
Original viewpoints that aren't reflected in the published universe are of course potentially interesting and important. But this is NOT what Wikipedia covers. You regard this as illogical, but it is actually very deliberate and sensible. Excluding such discussions preserves neutrality. Once you open that door to original research, there is no method for deciding what to include and what to exclude.
Instead, such discussions occur in the rest of the universe – in books, in blogs, in classrooms, on barstools, whatever. Once an issue bubbles up to prominence in public media, it can then find a place in Wikipedia (and these same rules apply to every encyclopedia). Regarding Godwin's Law and your reference to Hitler (which by traditional Usenet rules ends the debate), I guess we won't explore the relative notability of WRS and Mein Kampf. Trevor Hanson 20:46, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
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