1978: Spreadsheets = Sorcery
A generation ago, a tool unleashed the power of business modeling — and created the entrepreneurial boom that has transformed our economy
一代人之前，一种工具释放了商业模式的力量----创造了改变我们的经济的创业热潮。
I learned, belatedly, that last October 17 was Spreadsheet Day, marking the 35th anniversary of VisiCalc, the Apple II program that started it all. This moved me to republish a long piece I wrote 30 years ago about the significance, as well as the dangers, of this advance. (This was so long ago that I had to define what a cursor was!) The piece first appeared in , November 1984.
我后来才知道，我得知去年10月17日是Spreadsheet日，这一天是VisiCalc的35周年纪念日，也是Apple II程序的开端。这让我不得不重新发表30年前我写的一篇长篇文章，讲述这一进步的意义和危险。(那是很久以前的事了，以至于我必须定义一下什么是光标！)这篇文章首次出现在1984年11月的《Administrator》上。
As Dan Bricklin remembers it, the idea first came to him in the spring of 1978 while he was sitting in a classroom at the Harvard Business School. It was the kind of idea—so obvious, so right— that made him immediately wonder why no one else had thought of it. And yet it was no accident that this breakthrough should have been his.
丹•布里克林(Dan Bricklin)回忆道，这个想法最初是在1978年春天，当时他正坐在哈佛商学院(Harvard Business School)的一间教室里。 正是这种想法ーー如此明显，如此正确ーー使他立即感到奇怪，为什么没有其他人想到这个主意。 然而，这个突破应该是他的，这并非偶然。
Bricklin had graduated from MIT, where—and this is crucial to the idea he would have that afternoon in 1978— he had worked intimately with computers. Before deciding to go to graduate school he had worked for two major computer companies— first for Wang, then for the Digital Equipment Corporation, for whom he helped design a word-processing program. Like most Harvard MBA candidates, he wanted to be a businessman; but more often than not, his thoughts strayed to the technological.
Bricklin毕业于麻省理工学院，在那里--这对他1978年下午的想法至关重要--他曾与计算机打过交道。在决定上研究生之前，他曾在两家主要的计算机公司工作过--先是在王安公司，然后是数字设备公司，他帮助设计了一个文字处理程序。和大多数哈佛MBA考生一样，他也想成为一名商人，但更多的时候，他的心思偏向了技术领域。