This morning Socialtext is announcing that they are releasing SocialCalc (integrated into their enterprise-level wiki) in a wider beta, basically available for test to all of their paying customers. This release includes many advances since their last, much more limited beta release. It includes: Multi-level multi-sheet rollup (the old one only went one level down and didn't recalc that sheet), a much more polished user interface, faster save and load, better integration of advanced wikitext functionality, and all of the other advances in the latest SocialCalc (such as Ctrl-C/V system clipboard support for quick exchange of data with Excel and other applications). Socialtext developers and I have been working a long time to get to this. (While this uses the same basic spreadsheet engine as the OLPC version, it has lots of special Socialtext-specific UI code and makes use of SocialCalc's intersheet reference capabilities as well as Socialtext's online storage, collaboration, and access control functionality.)

[Screenshot of SocialCalc spreadsheet page in Socialtext in original post on Dan Bricklin's Log]

For me, this is really a major moment. I finally can do the demo I've been wanting to do for years: A complete budget example with a rollup of 50 states into a country total, with each of the 50 states' pages dependent upon other pages with country-wide values (such as price lists and model factors), and each with a link to a wiki discussion page.

[Diagram showing rollup]

You can change a master model factor (such as default growth or default product mix) or a particular state's values (such as sales growth override value) and then load the USA or regional page and see them all recalculated to provide the latest totals. We are showing that demo at the Enterprise 2.0 conference starting later this morning. I've made a 5-minute Camtasia screencast of the demo that you can look at here. For more information from Socialtext, go to their web site, www.socialtext.com.

This is a very exciting time for the SocialCalc project. For the last year I have been enhancing the main Open Source SocialCalc JavaScript code in various ways, many under the covers, but a few that show up in the user interface (such as a status line with recalc progress, support for Ctrl-C/V, some Move commands, and more).

That code is being used in a few projects. One is at Socialtext (which is paying for most of the development), which is taking the core engine and UI components and enhancing them with a much more polished UI and deep integration into their enterprise-level wiki and social software system. Look to them for some announcements in that regard soon, but not today. What they are doing is really great and achieving some of the main visions I've had for this project, as you'll see.

Other developers have added enhancements to the base code to integrate it onto the One Laptop Per Child's XO computer (and other systems based on the Sugar framework). People have been using earlier versions of this on the XO around the world for the past year. Today they have released a version that integrates XO-specific graphing functionality (needed for educational and other purposes) with my new code. This version is being made much more generally available than the previous early versions. Hopefully, it will result in SocialCalc being a standard component on XO computers.

What's really heartening for me is that the OLPC version involved the work of different people around the world who added new code to complement mine. This version is the basis on which other work is being done in the coming months to add other capabilities and to model and document different uses for schools and for use in microfinance.

You can read about the XO version (version 0.8.3g) on the Software for Education, Entertainment and Training Activities (SEETA) "SocialCalc on Sugar" page. Moving to this stage has been spearheaded by Manusheel Gupta in Delhi, India. Thank you, Manu!

You can read about the latest plain SocialCalc code, version 0.8.3, on the "Software Garden OLPC Home Page". It includes a release of my code (it does not include the new graphing code that is OLPC-specific and that was created by Nicholas Doiron, an engineering student from Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A. -- that's only in 0.8.3g). You can run a test version there with most modern browsers.

This is going to be a busy week. One event is the "What's Next in Tech: Exploring the Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond" event that Future Forward is hosting at the Boston University School of Management. (I'll be bringing some copies of my book "Bricklin on Technology" to give away.) There are some heavy hitters on both the panel (including Mike Dornbrook, COO, Harmonix Music Systems, the makers of "Rock Band", and Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot Corp. and founder of The Droid Works, and a few local venture capitalists who are funding new technologies) and in the audience (well-known bloggers, analysts, young entrepreneurs, other sources of capital, and more).

One of my more popular essays is the one on "What Will People Pay For?". A version of it has been reprinted in the Harvard Business Review, and it forms the start of Chapter 2 of my book. As part of posting various excerpts from my book on YouTube, I've added one of me reading that essay along with the blog post about cell phones that follows it in the book.

You can see the excerpts on my book videos page.

My blogging has been sparse again as we approach some new milestones with SocialCalc. (More about those later.) Tweeting (@DanB) is much less overhead and I've continued doing that. I'm working on a new essay, though, that comes out of a session I ran at a Mass Tech Leadership Council unConference.

On June 4-7, 1979, the National Computer Conference was held in New York City. As a side show, in a hotel down the street, there was a Personal Computing Festival. It was at that show that VisiCalc, the pioneering personal computer spreadsheet, was announced and first shown to the public.

In the general community, even in the general business community, there was little reaction at the time. Unlike today, when an upgrade to an operating system makes the evening news, major news organizations didn't even recognize the significance of this new tool when it was right there in front of their faces. Many individuals who saw VisiCalc demonstrated understood the implications and, when it shipped in late October 1979, brought it into their companies and had a temporary advantage over others. Over the next couple of years, businesses started to understand its value. By the time IBM announced their PC two years later, they made sure to say that it would have VisiCalc and that it would be ready when they first shipped.

30 years later, it is pretty amazing how far we have come. Personal computers are in most homes in the USA. A huge percentage of all people carry a personal computer in their pocket or purse (merged with a wireless telephone) that they use for text, voice, photo, and video communication, and increasingly for computing tasks including games, data organization like calendars and contact lists, and sophisticated graphics rendering. Spreadsheets are taught in grade schools and are used by millions of business people. Many young adults would rather have a laptop computer and an Internet connection than a television.

To commemorate this anniversary, Bob Frankston, who wrote most of the code for VisiCalc, and I, who came up with the specification of what it did, recorded some videos. In mine I read the part of my new book that is about the announcement, including the "almost" news report in the New York Times ("All hail VisiCalc" as part of the article "A Layman's Trip into the Mega-Mega Land of Computers"). Bob reads the entire text of the paper he delivered at the Personal Computing Festival part of the NCC and comments on it.

You can find these videos embedded on "Dan and Bob's Videos About the VisiCalc Announcement in 1979".

At the suggestion of various people, I recorded videos of me reading some excerpts from my book. You can see the videos (which are on YouTube) embedded on the "Videos for Bricklin on Technology" page. The first is from the very beginning of the book, followed by the beginning of Chapter 5 on Cooperation. The second video is the section of Chapter 1 titled "The Mindset of an Engineer" and includes a poem that I like as well as a joke with a message.

Over time I will probably record some more excerpts and post them. If you have any favorite passages in the book, let me know.

As part of publicizing my new book I've been contacting various technology podcasts and radio shows to see if they want a copy and if they'd want me on their show. One of them was the This Week in Tech show (twit.tv). It is mainly a podcast, but also available as streaming video during the show. The host, Leo Laporte, responded that he'd love to have me on the show. I was on it this week, Show 196. I've written up the whole experience of preparing and then appearing on it over Skype video. If you are interested in video, audio, or how the show is done, you might find it of interest.

Read Preparing for being on "This Week in Tech".

Here's a photo with Leo and me:

[Photo in the original blog post on Dan Bricklin's Log]

I'm finally getting some reviews of Bricklin on Technology on Amazon. I know I write too much about the book here, but these are the first Amazon reviews and as an author that is pretty exciting and important, so please humor me.

Brad Feld posted the review he posted on his blog as "Book: Bricklin on Technology". Some quotes:

(Of the books he read this weekend) the first - and most enjoyable - was Bricklin on Technology. I've somehow managed to end up with three of them - I know that Dan Bricklin sent me one and Amazon sent me one, but I don't know where the third came from. Dan told me about this book a few months ago when I saw him in Boston at the TechStars for a Day event. He's done an outstanding job of combining his essays on computing with updated thinking along with a bunch of great history. There are a dozen chapters – each are a “mini-book” within the book. My favorite was Chapter 12: VisiCalc (which is – not surprisingly – the history of VisiCalc) but the other chapters are all great...

I've always loved the way Dan's brain works and Bricklin on Technology is a bunch of it in one portable package.

Another Amazon review is from Scott Kirsner:

Bricklin has assembled a really valuable collection of visionary blog posts, interviews with people on the front lines of technological innovation, and PC industry history (he was the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet -- which is credited as being the original "killer app"). I especially enjoyed chapters two and three, which focus on what people will pay for in the digital world, and the way the media industries have tried to deal with easy copying (Napster, Grokster, BitTorrent, etc.) Entrepreneurs will probably appreciate chapter seven, which focuses on tools that Bricklin thinks ought to be created (or improved). "Bricklin on Technology" is like downloading a few gigs of Dan's brilliance directly to your cerebral cortex.

Finally, another appeared from Eric Lundquist:

I ran into Dan at a Boston Tech Tuesday meeting recently. I've known Dan since he was a regular at our PC Week Spencer Katt parties. In his new book "On Technology" he accomplishes a singular feat. He mixes past short form blogs and posts with long form essays to provide perspective on our technology-driven society. I particularly liked his long form on thoughts on blogging following his 2004 Democratic Convention Coverage. My favorite photo was of Dan doing a demo of VisiCalc at the 1979 (!) West Coast Computer Faire. If you had to pick one book that gives you a where did we come from and where are we going tech direction, this is it.

Thanks to them all!

As part of the research for my new book, Bricklin on Technology, I've been going through my old archives (read: boxes in the basement and attic) looking for special material to add to my book and to keep my memory honest. One of those artifacts is a paper that I wrote as a homework assignment in November of 1978 early in the development of VisiCalc. Other than for a little research Adam Green was doing for his studies a few years back when I first rediscovered it, I had forgotten about this until I was putting the book together.

From an historical viewpoint, the paper is very interesting. The assignment was to write a private, few page paper that was to be in the form of a short descriptive business school case on an advertising management issue or 2-3 brief caselets on related facets of such an issue. Accompanying the descriptive material was to be our own comments/analysis of the case situation. I chose to do a 2-part case.

For my paper I chose to address the issue of advertising for the program I was developing, eventually called VisiCalc. The final name had not been chosen (or even proposed, I think), so I used "Calcu-ledger" as a placeholder, and the "case" is called "Calcu-ledger". (Eventually, Dan Fylstra, the head of Personal Software, decided to use "VisiCalc" as the name. Naming products is always a tough task.)

I needed to make the "case" revolve around advertising, so I made assertions about choices and beliefs at Personal Software and of mine that may or may not have actually been true. (For example, I was not the one tasked with creating their advertising as asserted in the paper.) However, the background material and other writings that I provided should be of interest from an historical perspective. It has narrative about the industry and copies of advertisements from the time.

My favorite quote (some of which made it into my book) is from the end of the paper (and I really must have felt this way). Here is a scan of what the paper looked like (typed on my old Hermes electric typewriter and with a stain from an old paper clip) and then a transcription:

[Image of the scan in the original post on Dan Bricklin's Log]

A final word on the name "Calcu-ledger." Currently this appears to be the best name that I have been able to come up with. It has the unfortunate trait of not evoking the right image when heard out of context (ledger sounds too much like bookkeeping and accounting, and not easy use for non-accounting uses by non-accountants). Once the uses of the product are understood, though, its name becomes more appropriate (ledger is also a series of columns and rows). The uses are emphasized from the start in the ad, so I don't think that there will be many problems. Also, the name has a nice ring to it. Other names that I have thought of, such as "electronic spreadsheet" or "calcu-paper" don't sound right, or may not be understood by people, even after they know what it is (not everybody knows what a spreadsheet is, ledger is more common).

It's really funny to read things you wrote years later.

You can read the paper in PDF form: "Dan Bricklin's Special Short Paper for the Harvard Business School Advertising Course".

Here are some quotes from the interview Phil Windley conducted with me about Bricklin on Technology:

Early in the interview he said (at 3:18) "If any of the listeners have any hesitancy about a blog that got turned into a book, don't have it about this one because this one, actually, I found to be fascinating."

When I asked "Did it work for you guys?" (34:30) Phil answered, "Yeah. It did. When I saw what you've done, I thought, you know, if I really wanted to put my blog into a book, this is a good model . . . I think the biggest surprise for me was just the way you had taken material, spread out across time, brought it together into topics and written around it to give it context, and then you set the blog posts off separately with this kind of dotted line format around it -- that made it all work for me. I said, OK, I see how this could work now." Phil's friend Scott Lemon said, "When I first saw the book and how large it was I was thinking, oh my gosh, that's a ton to read, but what's fascinating, like Phil said, is that once I got in and started reading it actually flows well."

After going to so much trouble to figure out how I wanted to turn my blog into a book (as I wrote in "Turning My Blog Into A Book") it was great to hear that they felt I was successful.

I also tried to make the book accessible to non-techies. Phil said (22:38) "It's very readable, I think, as what you might call a popular technology book intended for a lay audience," and Scott added, "It turned out very good that way."

Scott Kirsner (author, writer for the Boston Globe, and host of various conferences, and a different Scott than on the podcast) tweeted this upon receiving his copy of the book: "@DanB's new book 'Bricklin on Technology' is like downloading a few gigs of Dan directly to your cerebral cortex Thanks, Dan!"