<story><title>My journey into personal computer software development in 1983</title><url>https://farrs.substack.com/p/my-journey-into-personal-computer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>Gosh, it&amp;#x27;s telling that as early as 1983 (!) the inventors of the spreadsheet thought that spreadsheets were &amp;#x27;done&amp;#x27; and they needed to move to more important things. This is like Rickenbacker in 1938 deciding that electric guitars were &amp;#x27;done&amp;#x27; and moving to, I don&amp;#x27;t know, Theremins or something.</text></comment>
<story><title>My journey into personal computer software development in 1983</title><url>https://farrs.substack.com/p/my-journey-into-personal-computer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>abraae</author><text>Say what you will about MS (and I said a lot when I worked at Lotus on the mainframe port of Lotus 1-2-3) but they knew what was important for success.&lt;p&gt;A spreadsheet on it&amp;#x27;s own is a thing of technical beauty but for market domination you don&amp;#x27;t want to keep pouring resources into that one product, you want a suite of complimentary products.&lt;p&gt;You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a document, into a slide presentation. You want cutting and pasting to work sensibly between products. You want consistency in the menus and layouts.&lt;p&gt;Bill Gates understood all of this from the beginning, the same as he understood that the strength of a PC operating system is not how reliable, memory safe and performant it is, it&amp;#x27;s in how flashy it looks and how important the windows paradigm is.</text></comment>