'Recalc Or Die': 30 Years Later, Microsoft Excel 1.0 Vets Recount A Project That Defied The Odds

 

Mike Koss, Jabe Blumenthal, Doug Klunder and Jon DeVaan with Excel 1.0.

Microsoft has recently been making lots of apps for iOS and Android, despite the fact that those platforms are rivals to its own Windows operating system. But this is actually not a new phenomenon at the company.

Mike Koss runs Excel 1.0 on a 512K Mac this week.

Just ask Doug Klunder, the lead developer for Microsoft Excel 1.0, who quit his job after Bill Gates and other Microsoft leaders decided to shift the original Excel project from MS-DOS to the Apple Macintosh more than three decades ago.

Klunder ended up coming back to Microsoft and finishing the project, after an ill-fated stint as a farm worker in the lettuce fields of California. But even today, with Excel still going strong, he isn’t convinced Microsoft made the best choice.

“I’m still not entirely sure it was the right decision,” he said this week, laughing with his former Excel colleagues. “In some ways it worked out well, but it did put us years behind, because we shipped on the Mac and gave Lotus that much longer to consolidate on the PC platform. I still think we could have taken them on.”

Klunder was one of four members of the Excel 1.0 team who joined us to record a podcast (below) at the GeekWire offices this week, reflecting on the creation of one the most important products in Microsoft’s history.

Software developer Mike Koss, the unofficial historian of the original Excel team, brought an original 512K Mac running the first version of Excel on floppy disks, a “Recalc or Die” motorcycle jacket and shirt, technical documents and other memorabilia from the Excel 1.0 era — mementos of a landmark Microsoft product.

“Microsoft really bet its future on two programs at right about the same time: Excel and Windows,” Klunder said. “If both of them had failed, Microsoft wouldn’t be here today. Both of them succeeded. It really helped cement Microsoft’s role.”

This weekend, many of the original Excel team members are getting together to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the software’s release, along with others who have been involved in Excel over the years. (Members of the extended Excel family should email excelis30@outlook.com for info and to RSVP.)

Doug Klunder, then and now. He’s now a lawyer who does privacy work for the ACLU.

Thirty years later, their passion for the project still runs deep — as evidenced by Klunder sticking to his guns on the company’s Mac vs. DOS decision. It’s clear that one of the main reasons Excel beat out rivals such as Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc was the determination and ingenuity of the original team.

Of course, there were other factors, as well.

“It’s important to point out that largely it was a matter of ripping off really good ideas from other products,” said Jabe Blumenthal, who was Microsoft’s first program manager, working on the Excel team. But he quickly noted, “Doug will take exception to that because he did some really cool original stuff.”

Klunder said, “We certainly ripped some stuff off, but we also did some things that nobody else had done at the time and probably hasn’t done since — some of which are really insane, and some of which turn out to be pretty handy.”

Mike Koss, a member of the original Excel team, is now a software developer at Google. He has been an active member and organizer of Seattle’s startup community.

This is where “Recalc or Die” comes in. One of Excel’s features was “intelligent recalc,” created by Klunder, which gave Excel an advantage over Lotus 1-2-3 by being smart about the way it recalculated cells in a spreadsheet.

Rather than recalculating all the cells when one cell was changed, it selectively recalculated cells affected by the change — making the program more efficient and improving its performance on the limited hardware of early personal computers.

This feature was important enough that Bill Gates took a special interest in it. “Bill was very interested in the recalc problem,” Koss said. “I remember having meetings with him into Excel 2, Excel 3, where he was very interested in getting an optimal recalc and doing better.”

But the significance of the feature was also a risk, because Klunder was the only one who knew its secrets.

“Just imagine having this product where one of the key components of it is really only understood by this guy who will quit routinely and go be a migrant farm worker down in California,” Blumenthal said, laughing with the group. “It was not necessarily the most traditional or stable of environments.”

Jabe Blumenthal, Microsoft’s original program manager, is now focusing on climate and clean energy advocacy, including work with Bill Gates. He taught high school math and physics after leaving Microsoft.

Excel was a learning experience for everyone. Blumenthal, for example, recalled initially being skeptical about his colleague Steve Hazlerig’s idea to “print” a document to the screen as a way of checking the output before printing to paper. Blumenthal couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do that. But he recognized that he could be wrong, and that Hazlerig had more experience with printing than he did. And so he let the feature live.

“I’m so, so glad that I don’t go down in history as the person who killed Print Preview,” he said.

Blumenthal pioneered the position of program manager at Microsoft, and the way he handled the Print Preview situation was characteristic of the best program managers, said Jon DeVaan, another Excel 1.0 team member, who would go on to become a high-ranking Microsoft Windows and Office engineering executive before leaving the company in 2013.

“The best program managers do what you just said,” DeVaan told Blumenthal during the conversation this week. “The people that struggle more in the job are the people that want to be in charge, and that doesn’t work out so well. The reality is, everybody is really passionate about what they do, and they want to have a voice in how things turn out. The best way to handle that is to allow the expression to happen, and come up with a good decision.”

Jon DeVaan went on to become a key Microsoft engineering executive for Office and then Windows, before leaving the company in 2013.

Among other tidbits, they shared the fact that the product almost didn’t end up being called Excel. “Odyssey” was the code name, and product names that were considered included “Master Plan” and “Mr. Spreadsheet,” before a professional naming firm came up with the final brand.

Many of the original Excel team members still use the program today — the RSVP sheet for this weekend’s party is an Excel Online document — and take pride in the software’s impact on the world.

“It’s been so much fun,” said DeVaan. “Everywhere in the world I’ve ever been, people know what Excel is, and can tell their stories about how it empowered them, and it’s just awesomely cool.”

“It’s not like there wouldn’t have been a dominant spreadsheet in the world had it not been Excel,” said Blumenthal. “It’s always important to start these things off by saying, the brilliant invention was the invention of VisiCalc. But it’s so cool that I got to participate in this thing at such a ridiculously young age with a whole bunch of really fun and inspiring people to work with. Every day I thank my lucky stars for having had that experience.”

“The world, I don’t think, looks any different than it would if we hadn’t done it, because somebody else would have done it,” he said. “But that’s OK. We got to participate in something incredibly fun.”

Nokia 1100 is Still the Biggest Selling Handset in the World

The world’s best selling phone is not the iPhone but something very old and not a smartphone at all? Remember the classic old Nokia 1100, the phone we all perhaps began with? While the iPhone 6 may have sold 71 million units in about three months, the numbers have nothing on the Nokia 1100.

 

The Nokia 1100 was an entry-level handset that came out in 2003. At the time it was perhaps the best thing to ever hit the mobile market. Lets consider this a 2003 post and talk of the specs that makes the phone a true badass. The handset does not come with two cameras, a curved screen or a snapdragon processor. What it does feature is a torch-light, a pair of no-slip grips, dust-proof case, monochrome graphic with, wait for it, 96 x 65 pixels, monophonic ringtones (36 pre-installed, 7 user-made), interchangeable covers, and an unbreakable will (we mean it).

This smooth handset can also store up to 50 contacts and 50 messages (25 sent, 25 received) and gives a whopping 400 hours standby time between charges. But the one thing that really tied this phone together was Snakes II and Space Impact – those 8-bit games that were played by 250 million people around the world.

We say 250 million because that’s how many units of the Nokia 1100 were sold by 2008, becoming not only the world’s best selling phone, but also the best selling consumer electronics device. There are many reasons behind why the 1100 was the craze at the time. For one thing, the phone was highly affordable at about $100 with all the features mentioned above, which were all that one needed at the time.

The phone was discontinued in 2008 because of the next wave of phones that were coming in, However, in 2009, the obsolete device became something of a collectors item as they were being sold for obscene amounts of money – say $32,000 a piece.

But if you thought you had seen the last of the Nokia 1100, think again. There are rumors that the classic handset might come back with a technological makeover. In March this year, the Nokia 1100 was seen in a GeekBench’s database and suggested that the 2016 Nokia 1100 will feature a quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT-6582 processor and will reportedly run on Android 5.0. However, this could all be an elaborate ruse by Nokia to use an old model since under the terms of its deal with Microsoft, Nokia cannot offer a new smartphone under the last quarter of 2016. It would be fun, though, to see what the 1100 would look like fitted with all the new toys today.

How to Block banner popups on any website domain, using AdBlock

 

Recently there has been some news on the net about the morality of adblock software. On one side, ads are required to run a site, as it generates revenue. On the other side, users have had enough of in-your-face huge ads which consume bandwidth and complicate browsing.

Many sites welcome visitors with huge banners taking up the entire front space, pushing the visitor to a hostage like scenario. Extensions like adblock do a good job of blocking ads on the side of the page content, but cannot block (or do not block, I am not sure) these huge banner ads. Adding a simple rule to the adblocker can  fix the problem for you.

For instance, this is what I got when I visited the website of a news paper in India

 

Heres how to block this ad completely in the future on this site.

1: Install AdBlock extension in your browser.

2: On getting this banner ad, right click on the banner itself and choose Adblock->Block this ad.

3: You will now get a popup with a slider on it. Adjust the slider to the right, so that the banner ad and the transparent overlay disappear completely.

 

4: Click on Looks Good. And on the next pop-up, confirm by clicking on the Block It ! Button.

Adblock will not add a rule into the system, so that any HTML DIV where Id = nlpopup is blocked on this domain.

Thats it ! You will never ever get this ad on this domain again..

Well..until they change the ad DIV or decide on more banner ads again.

Cya !

Antikythera Shipwreck Yields New Cache Of Ancient Treasures

 

Over 2,000 years ago, the churning ocean below the cliffs of the Greek island Antikythera swallowed a massive ship loaded with a trove of luxuries—fine glassware, marble statues and, famously, a complex geared device thought to be the earliest computer.

Discovered by Greek sponge divers in 1900, the shipwreck has since yielded some of the most impressive antiquities to date. And while severe weather has hampered recent dives, earlier this month a team of explorers recovered more than 50 stunning new items, including a bone or ivory flute, delicate glassware fragments, ceramics jugs, parts of the ship itself and a bronze armrest from what was possibly a throne.

“Every single dive on the wreck delivers something interesting; something beautiful,” marvels Brendan Foley, a marine archeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and co-director of the project. “It’s like a tractor-trailer truck wrecked on the way to Christie’s auction house for fine art—it’s just amazing.”

The wreck of the Antikythera ship hides beneath a few feet of sand and scattered shards of ceramic fragments at a depth of about 180 feet. Following an initial excavation funded by the Greek government, explorer Jacques Cousteau returned to the wreck in 1976 to mine the seemingly endless bounty, recovering hundreds of items.

But with even more modern advances in diving and scientific equipment, scientists believed the Antikythera wreckage had more secrets to reveal.

In 2014, an international team of archaeologists, divers, engineers, filmmakers and technicians embarked on the first excavation of this site in 40 years, using detailed and meticulous scientific techniques to not only find new treasures but also to try and reconstruct the ship's history.

The team used autonomous robots to produce hyper-precise maps of the site in partnership with the University of Sydney Australia, says Foley. These maps—accurate down to about a tenth of an inch—were pivotal for both planning dives and mapping discoveries.

The team also carefully scanned the site with metal detectors, mapping out the extent of the wreckage and deciding where to excavate. Using waterproofed iPads, the divers could mark each new artifact on the map in real time.

For the latest round of dives, a ten-person team logged over 40 hours underwater, surfacing with the fresh haul. Analyzing the artifacts should provide the team with a wealth of information, says Foley.

The Antikythera shipwreck is spread across two different sites separated by about the length of a football field, he says. Analytic tools, like comparing the stamps on amphora handles from each site, will help scientists determine whether the wreck represents one or two ships.

If it was two ships, “that opens up a whole series of questions,” says Foley. “Were they sailing together? Did one try to help the other?”

Still, the large size of objects recovered at the primary wreckage site suggests that at least one ship was massive, akin to an ancient grain ship. One such item recently recovered as part of the latest haul was a lead salvage ring about 15.7 inches wide, used to straighten tangled anchor lines. 

image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/07/fe/07feeb87-006f-4722-9a41-3c32a2344845/at1.jpg__600x0_q85_upscale.jpg

In their latest expedition, divers recovered over 50 artifacts, which hint at the history of the massive ship. (Brett Seymour EUA/ARGO)

 

The wreck of the Antikythera ship is buried under several feet of sand and scattered shards of ceramic fragments at a depth of about 180 feet. (Brett Seymour EUA/ARGO)

 

An autonomous underwater vehicle surveys the wreck, creating a three-dimensional map of the site. (Phillip Short ARGO)

 

During the latest round of dives, the team logged over 40 hours underwater. (Brett Seymour EUA/ARGO)

 

Divers carefully clear away sand and rubble to recover the often delicate artifacts. (Brett Seymour EUA/ARGO)

image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/a7/3a/a73a6107-ab1f-4f85-a6a0-5b52052e46a4/at3.jpg__600x0_q85_upscale.jpg

A diver displays his find. The shipwreck has yielded some of the most impressive antiquities to date. (Brett Seymour EUA/ARGO)

 

Scientists will study each artifact recovered in great detail, with hopes to reconstruct the history of the ship and its precious cargo. (Brett Seymour EUA/ARGO)

Scientists hope to learn more about the origin of the ship—or ships—by analyzing the isotopic composition of lead artifacts similar to this ring, which will yield information about where the vessel itself was made.

For the ceramic artifacts, the team plans to look closely at any residues preserved inside the container walls. “Not only are [the ceramics] beautiful in their own right, but we can extract DNA from them,” says Foley. That could give information about ancient medicines, cosmetics and perfumes.

The team currently has plans to head back out to the site in May, but the future of the project is open-ended. With so much information to glean from the current set of artifacts, Foley says that they could let the site sit for another generation. With the rapid advance of technology, future expeditions may have even better techniques and be able to discover even more about the wreckage.

“What will be available a generation from now, we can’t even guess,” he says.

Why India Won't Get A Permanent Seat At UNSC

India has been actively pursuing its quest for permanent membership of the UN Security Council (UNSC). It has pushed for text based negotiations in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as a step to move forward the agenda of UNSC reform and expansion stuck fruitlessly in the Open-Ended Working Group all these years. Now that the UNGA has resolved to commence such negotiations in the 70th UNGA session, there is sense of progress. Many would rightly say that the start of text based negotiations does not mean that India is anywhere near obtaining permanent membership. The text in question is not a mature document that could be finalised or significantly progressed during the current UNGA session. In reality, this is the start of a long drawn-out process with no visible closure date. No breakthrough that brings us within striking distance of our aspiration has actually been achieved.

Hard reality

Some believe that an unjustified sense of achievement is being projected officially, or, worse, that official India is being hopelessly naive in ignoring the hard reality that UNSC expansion remains a remote proposition. To think that our professionals have been hypnotised by their success in terms of better structuring the process would be unwarranted. They understand that the process now begun does not guarantee success on substance within any predictable time-frame. The negotiating text is a 25 page document that contains the views of diverse groups of countries, whether the L69, the G-4 or the African group, on five identified parameters, namely, the size of the expansion in the permanent and non-permanent categories, regional distribution, the working methods of the Security Council, its relationship with the UNGA, and veto powers. These are complex issues on which negotiations could drag on for ages. To expect concrete results from the 70th UNGA session would be to harbour illusions.

Nevertheless, to view the introduction of a negotiating text as a futile exercise would not be justified either. That China, Russia and the Uniting for Consensus (UFC) countries (comprising countries like Pakistan, Italy, Mexico, Egypt, South Korea etc) have rejected the text and strongly opposed its introduction suggests that they see this step as a breach in their strategy to continue stalling the process of reform and expansion through open-ended discussions without any working text. They have made demarches with member states to change their position, but without success. China, Russia and US have effectively boycotted the process by refusing to provide any inputs to the negotiating text. The UFC countries too have not provided any input but have asked the UNGA president to attach their letter to the text. France and UK have, on the contrary, provided inputs. Russia’s negative position has been particularly noted in India. We expect China to block our bid for permanent membership as much as possible.

Highly restrictive

We know the highly restrictive US position on expansion, including its ambivalent phraseology on our claim for permanent membership. Russia has supported our candidature for years now, which is why its heavy-duty opposition to a negotiating text has come as a surprise. This suggests that they along with China actually do not want UNSC expansion. In discussions with us the Russians apparently claim that they have no issue with India’s membership and that of Brazil, but are strongly against that of Japan and Germany. The UN Charter requires a two-third majority for amendments, but Russia wants the expansion and reform issue to be decided by a larger majority, a “near consensus” as they say.

Current challenge

Russia otherwise insists on the supremacy of the Charter, but, inconsistently, not in this case. Their other argument that the vote will be “divisive” is not convincing because the last expansion was decided not only by a two-third majority, but was divisive, as two permanent members abstained. While we are of the view that reform and expansion will improve the functioning of the UNSC, the Russians are concerned about disintegration and fragmentation of the UN as a result. We would prefer Russia to be less rejectionist on the issue.

The immediate challenge is to ensure that the next UNGA chair picks up the baton from his predecessor and sees that Inter-Governmental Negotiations (IGN) on the negotiating text begin in November. Beyond that, if no consensus is reached on a text which can be put to a vote- which one can safely assume would be the case — other choices are available. It can be a member driven or chair driven process. A broader coalition, which would include India, can take the initiative to present their own text for vote. The ING chair at some stage can present a text-a “zero draft” for further negotiations, emulating the process followed with the adoption of the Post-2015 Development Agenda by world leaders this month in New York. If ever a decision gets taken with no P-5 veto in the UNSC (politically difficult if the UNGA delivers a two-third majority on the issue), all member countries will have to ratify the agreement.

If cynics are right in doubting whether the P-5 will easily agree to share power with would-be aspirants, the more hopeful may not be wrong in believing that circumstances will force a change. The crisis we see today reflect the failure of the UNSC as presently constituted to ensure global peace and security.