My Dream

Posted on April 10, 2003

What do I want out of life?

Dan Bricklin, the fellow who came up with VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, has a great history site describing the process by which VisiCalc went from an idea to an industry. You can even download the original VisiCalc for IBM PC — it runs fine under Windows 2000, amazingly enough. One page of the site describes how Harvard has put up a plaque in the room where he dreamed up VisiCalc where working towards his MBA. (Scroll down to the bottom to see it.)

“In this room in 1978, Dan Bricklin, MBA ’79 conceived of the first spreadsheet program. VisiCalc, original killer app of the information age, forever changed how people used computers in business.”

How cool is that? That’s my dream — to come up with an idea so cool, so original, that twenty years later somebody wants not just to remember it, but to commemorate it!

Big dream? Sure. Realistic? Probably not. But if you’re going to dream you may as well dream big or you’re kind of missing the point.