VisiCalc Creator Developing WikiCalc

In 1979, Bricklin released VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers. Now he's close to finishing the beta for WikiCalc, an open-source, browser-based collaboration tool that mimics the functionality of a spreadsheet while leveraging the technology of wikis, which let anyone, anywhere manipulate data across the Web.

Currently in alpha--though a stable beta version is expected by the end of February--WikiCalc is a general purpose tool developed with AJAX that runs either locally or off a server on Windows, Mac OS X, Unix or Linux. WikiCalc is designed to let people enter, store and modify data in the tabular format with which so many Excel, Lotus 1-2-3 and, yes, VisiCalc users are familiar.

"With (Excel), you get people playing e-mail volleyball with attachments all day long, so it's grossly inefficient," Mayfield said. "How do you track changes on a spreadsheet? What happens if you don't have just two people going back and forth, (but) have a finance department of 40 people trying to roll up numbers."

Bricklin's answer is to make it possible for anyone using WikiCalc to enter data and for anyone else to edit that data and have those edits be reflected on everyone's computers instantaneously.

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