08/04/06 19:26:56
VisiCalcの考案者Dan Bricklinによるアイデアの説明
URLﾘﾝｸ(www.danbricklin.com)
Danの電卓がHPじゃなくてTIなのが意外な感じ。
The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to me while I was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on my MBA degree, in the spring of 1978.
Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream.
"Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse..." (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto).
And "..imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me.
I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer '10% will be fine!'"
(10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't do very complicated calculations...)