Is "tools for thought" a scientific field? A design discipline? A "scene" in the arts? A tradition of craft? Day to day—what should I do today?—I feel pulled wildly between these framings.
Newly unlocked "letter from the lab" on navigating this tension:
Conversation
I suspect that you may be misreading the origin story of VisiCalc: youtu.be/ORvwzo-f1Sc They seem to have been driven by a serious context of use and a humble desire to _serve_ others who had the same problems rather than abstract science or innovation for its own sake.
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Yes, I agree! That's why it's in the "design" section rather than the "science" section. This account seems (to me!) compatible with the internal experience I describe; see e.g. the discussion at 6:49 ("How do you represent values in formulas?", about finding the primitive)
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Curious if you could help me find the crux?
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I see this space as a scene in the same way as 1970s 8 bit (homebrew) computing. It’s the intersection of multiple competing approaches. It’s too early to tell who is the Altair 8800 and who is the Apple II so we have to stay open to the possibility of new lenses and hybrids.
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There were similar apps before VisiCalc but they didn’t fit the zeitgeist. In many ways Soulver or today’s executable notebooks seem like a better match for the VisiCalc vision than VisiCalc. The difference is Bricklin had a lens and a story that made sense to lots of people then
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Oh, can you say more about similar apps before VisiCalc? That's new to me!
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There were batch-oriented mainframe based systems such as LANPAR, Autoplan, B and various reporting/analysis tools: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadshe at least 10 years before VisiCalc.
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Thank you! My vague recollection is that VisiCalc was the first with the "formula as cell value" primitive, but I haven't checked that carefully enough.
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I think so. It took until Lotus Improv before anyone tried to move away from that model. I was a fan but they couldn’t explain their model well enough and didn’t have a good port from NeXT to Windows.
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