The concept of an electronic spreadsheet was outlined in the 1961 paper "Budgeting Models and System Simulation" by Richard Mattessich. Some credit for the computerized spreadsheet perhaps belongs to Pardo and Landau, who filed a patent (U.S. Patent no. 4,398,249) on some of the related algorithms in 1970. While the patent was originally rejected by the patent office as being a purely mathematical invention, Pardo and Landau won a court case establishing that "something does not cease to become patentable merely because the point of novelty is in an algorithm." This case helped establish the viability of Software patents.

The generally recognized inventor of the spreadsheet is Dan Bricklin. Bricklin has spoken of watching his university professor create a table of calculation results on a blackboard. When the professor found an error, he had to tediously erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table, triggering Bricklin to think that he could replicate the process on a computer, using a blackboard/spreadsheet paradigm to view results of underlying formulas.

His idea became VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, and the "killer application" that turned the personal computer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a business tool.

excerpt from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet

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