Two fresh Harvard graduates built the first electronic spreadsheet for phone company budgets
In the summer of 1969 Rene Pardo and Remy Landau, just out of Harvard, decided a Bell Canada budget manager should not need programmers every time a form changed. Their program, LANPAR, let users type formulas in any order and worked out the correct sequence itself, a trick some famous later spreadsheets lacked.
That trick, forward referencing or natural-order calculation, meant a cell could depend on another cell further down the sheet and still get the right answer. VisiCalc, SuperCalc and the first MultiPlan instead calculated left to right and top to bottom, so users had to keep recalculating until the numbers stopped changing. LANPAR, short for language for programming arrays at random, also introduced cell references by position. It ran budgets for Bell Canada, AT&T, 18 regional telephone companies and General Motors.
Pardo and Landau filed a patent on their calculation method in 1970. The patent office rejected it as pure mathematics, and only after 12 years of appeals did a court side with them in 1983, declaring that an algorithm at the heart of an invention does not automatically bar a patent. The victory was short-lived: in 1995 another court ruled the patent unenforceable because of the inventors' conduct during the application, a decision upheld the next year.
Others had approached the idea too. Richard Mattessich outlined computerised budgeting sheets in a 1961 paper, working on whole rows and columns rather than individual cells, and R. Brian Walsh's Business Computer Language ran on IBM machines from 1962. The breakthrough for ordinary users came with VisiCalc in 1979, the program that made people buy an Apple II. Lotus 1-2-3 then ruled the DOS era, Microsoft Excel took over later, and Google launched its web spreadsheet in 2006.
The name predates computers. Accountants used spread sheet by 1906 for a ledger grid spread across two facing pages or oversized ruled paper. Tables themselves go back much further, to Babylonian clay tablets around 1800 BCE.
Source: Spreadsheet
