VisiCalc

VisiCalc is one of the first electronic spreadsheets. It was created by Dan Brickling.

A short TED talk about the history behind VisiCalc by Dan.

Bob Frankston who was the implementor of Visicalc, and later worked at Microsoft, though not on Excel.

Excel was inferior to Supercalc for many years, only winning because it was almost difficult to buy a PC without windows and office preinstalled for a chunk of the 90s

Steve Jobs acknowledged that VisiCalc had "propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved".

People had already been buying Apple computers primarily to run VisiCalc for four years when Lotus 1-2-3 came out.