Annaliza Nebres

OOC

June 5, 2008

Case Study 5

Dan Bricklin

(Co founder Software Arts)

Software Arts was founded by Dan Bricklin and his friendBob Frankton an 1979 who was able to produce electronic spreadsheets called Visicalc. Bob worked as a consultant and Dan worked for some big company liked Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC). Dan and Bon both worked on the basic system of APL.

Before they come up with a spreadsheet, they worked on Bob’s thesis called “Limited Service System”, they share the same computer over a terminal. It was a way to throttle your usage so that nobody would use more than a certain amount. Bob and Bricklin have an idea on how to handle a business because both of their parents are entrepreneurs. The father and grandfather of Bricklin are both painters. Out of typesetting, he go into video editing for typesetting and out of that he ended up to a word processing group. And he be4came the first processing system that DEC did. He had done entrepreneurs so he comes up of an idea of interpreted language, together with word processor and you’re sitting there in a business school running numbers. He took the general layout for the spreadsheet came from an idea of the word processing and computerized type setting world, together with the calculating world of APL and Basic. He prototyped the Visicalc on one of his machines. They stared discussing it and agreed to sell. Dan do the prototyping but since he don’t have enough time to program it, Bob did the programming. On Oct. 1997, Visalc was release and it ignited the personal computer software revolution.

One of the hurdles was the originally vision of electronic blackboard or work are. At the end they sell their company at Lotus because of bankruptcy. This entire thing happened. The wonderful up and horrible down of a business.

The three things that I learned in Software Arts, was, first, all start up begin with nothing except their ideas of something and all of them have their friends who are willing to help them, give them support and motivate them. Most of their friends are their friends during college days. Second, if you have a strong friendly relationship, even though how many trials and obstacles that you’re going through, you can survive helping each other. Third the experience you have. It can help you to begin your startup. It can somehow be easy for you because you have a background. I’ve also learned that things start with nothing that’s why you called it a startup. And in business there are times that you’re on top or sometimes you’re down