Had a bit of a snow day today so I had a chance to catch up on a couple of podcasts, the best of the day being the Dan Bricklin interview on Robert Cringely’s NERD-TV. I remembered Bricklin mostly for his Demo program (a prototyping/demonstration program that made vendor demonstrations of vaporware a staple of tradeshows), but discovered he was also a co-creator of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet).
So why do I bring this up? Two things…
If you wonder whether software bloat is real, consider this. The original version of VisiCalc was 27K. Yes, smaller than the jpg image file that illustrates this entry. You can still download a working copy of this program from Bricklin’s website at: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm.
The fact that you can still download that working version brings me to the second point. Because it wasn’t copy-protected, it can be distributed to you and still run on your computer nearly 25 years after it’s 1981 release. Poking around a bit more on www.danbricklin.com, I found a document entitled “Copy Protection Robs The Future” that I recommend. It examines the relationships between copy protection and preservation and while it must be a few years old (based on a few of the internal links), it’s still relevant to libraries, open-access and a number of other things we deal with daily.