SuperCalc

SuperCalc

SuperCalc4 on DOS.
Developer(s)	Sorcim
Initial release	1980; 37 years ago (1980)
Stable release	5.5
Operating system	CP/M; MS-DOS; VMS
Type	Spreadsheet

SuperCalc is a CP/M-80 spreadsheet application published by Sorcim in 1980. Visicalc was the first spreadsheet program but was not available for the popular CP/M operating system. SuperCalc was created to fill that void and market opportunity. It was originally bundled (along with WordStar) as one of the CP/M applications included with the Osborne 1 portable computer. It quickly became popular for CP/M and was ported to MS-DOS in 1982.

An improvement over VisiCalc (though using much the same command structure using the slash key), SuperCalc was one of the first spreadsheet programs capable of iteratively solving circular references (cells that depend on each other's results). It would be over 10 years after the introduction of SuperCalc before this feature was implemented in Microsoft Excel, although in Lotus 1-2-3, manual programming of iterative logic could also be used to solve this issue. According to the SuperCalc product manager, iterative calculations were added when Sorcim changed from binary-coded decimal to binary math. Since the precision of the two math packages was different, some IF statements resolved differently, and iterative calculations helped solve this problem.

Versions of SuperCalc were later released for the Apple II family, for PCs running DOS, and, after Sorcim was bought by CA Technologies (CA) in the mid-1980s, for MS Windows (under the name CA-SuperCalc). The MS-DOS versions were more popular with many users than was the market-leading Lotus 1-2-3 because it was distributed without copy protection (as well as being priced lower).