If you’re following “Hardcore Software” on substack then we just finished the first chapter w/ Windows 3.0 ship May 1990 …rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/007-windows-… (pls subscribe it’s fun!)
Just before then Excel for Windows shipped in 1987—the first Windows version. Some fun Excel background 1/
Just before then Excel for Windows shipped in 1987—the first Windows version. Some fun Excel background 1/
2/ Excel for Mac shipped in 1985 and received very strong reviews and was quite successful. Between Mac Excel and Mac Word, Microsoft “Applications” had grown to be the leading Mac vendor and also about half of Microsoft!
3/ Windows Excel was built by creating a cross-platform layer (what it was called in code) enabling Windows and Mac to share the core engine for calculation/charting/etc. But it still needed Windows...but no one had Windows.
4/ So when Excel 2.0 shipped it shipped *with* Windows. When installed, Windows was also installed. At the “C:” prompt if you typed excel.exe it launched Windows. 
5/ In fact the system requirements for Excel 2.0 didn’t even list Windows. I like that it says it is not copy protected. It only needed 640K even!
These screen shots and video from @jondevaan, member of the original Excel team and dev mgr by Excel 5.
These screen shots and video from @jondevaan, member of the original Excel team and dev mgr by Excel 5.
6/ Windows is listed as optional, in case you already had it. Also optional was a math coprocessor chip (about 10x the size of an iPhone SoC these days and all it did was floating point math). Windows/386 was a special version of Windows that used 386 memory management.
7/ These screens are from a 25 minute video “Soul of the New Machines”. The video had to explain to traditional PC and MS-DOS offices what a graphical spreadsheet could do. Here is a clip that shows the incredible use of…artificial intelligence…to create a chart legend. // END
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