The App That Sold the Apple II

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]A bored MBA student watched his professor erase an entire financial model off a chalkboard because one number changed.

[00:00:08]Dan Bricklin was sitting in a Harvard Business School class in 1978 [music] and the thought that hit him was simple.

[00:00:15]What if the chalkboard recalculated itself?

[00:00:18]He and programmer Bob Frankston built VisiCalc for the Apple II. It launched in 1979.

[00:00:25]And what happened next reshaped an entire industry.

[00:00:29]VisiCalc became the reason people bought Apple II computers.

[00:00:33]For the first time, a piece of software was driving hardware sales.

[00:00:38]Businesses that had no use for a personal computer suddenly needed one because VisiCalc could do in minutes what took accountants days.

[00:00:46]Apple's revenue went from $7.8 million to $117 million in 2 years largely because of a spreadsheet. The personal computer had existed before this, but it lived in garages and hobbyists' workshops.

[00:01:01]VisiCalc moved it onto the desks of people running businesses, crunching numbers, making decisions.

[00:01:08]The spreadsheet made the personal computer a business tool.

[00:01:11]A student's frustration with a chalkboard created the application category that justified the personal computer revolution.