Daniel S. Bricklin
| Dan Bricklin | |
|---|---|
Dan Bricklin
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| Born |
July 16, 1951 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) Harvard University (MBA) |
| Known for |
VisiCalc Dan Bricklin's Demo Program |
Daniel Singer "Dan" Bricklin (born 16 July 1951), often referred to as “The Father of the Spreadsheet”, is the American co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and Trellix Corporation, which is currently owned by Web.com. He currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Alpha Software.
His book, Bricklin on Technology, was published by Wiley in May 2009.
Bricklin was born in a Jewish family in Philadelphia, where he attended Akiba Hebrew Academy during his high school years. He earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973, where he was a resident of Bexley Hall. He began his college career as a mathematics major, but soon switched to computer science.
Upon graduating from MIT, Bricklin worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) until 1976, when he began working for FasFax, a cash register manufacturer. In 1977, he decided to return to school, and he earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard University in 1979.
While a student at Harvard Business School, Bricklin co-developed VisiCalc in 1979, making it the first electronic spreadsheet readily available for home and office use. It ran on an Apple II computer, and was considered a fourth generation software program. VisiCalc is widely credited for fueling the rapid growth of the personal computer industry. Instead of doing financial projections with manually calculated spreadsheets, and having to recalculate with every single cell in the sheet, VisiCalc allowed the user to change any cell, and have the entire sheet automatically recalculated. This could turn 20 hours of work into 15 minutes and allowed for more creativity.
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