Rich Harris has it right. LANPAR is in fact the world's first electronic spreadsheet. The inventors/creators also invented implementing Forward Referencing - the cornerstone of spreadsheets. This was in 1969, ten years before Visicac and 14 years before Lotus 1-2-3.
LANPAR was used extensively for Plant Budgeting operations across every telephone company in North America throughout the early 70's.
VisiCalc, SuperCalc and TKSolver did not have Forward referencing. You had to manually refresh the screen (recalculate the entire spreadsheet) and watch to see when cells stopped changing values (if they needed results from cells further in the spreadsheet (left to right, top to bottom).
Lotus 1-2-3 did have Forward Referencing. Multiplan I, did not and accordingly could not hurt Lotus until MultiPlan II incorporated it.
I had communications from magazine editor(s) who simply had not been aware of LANPAR because it was so far ahead of its time, and 10 years later VisiCalc implemented its spreadsheet on Apple's microcomputer - popularizing spreadsheets at a consumer level. So Yes, Rich Harris got it
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 18.0 ms ] threadVisiCalc, SuperCalc and TKSolver did not have Forward referencing. You had to manually refresh the screen (recalculate the entire spreadsheet) and watch to see when cells stopped changing values (if they needed results from cells further in the spreadsheet (left to right, top to bottom).
Lotus 1-2-3 did have Forward Referencing. Multiplan I, did not and accordingly could not hurt Lotus until MultiPlan II incorporated it.
I had communications from magazine editor(s) who simply had not been aware of LANPAR because it was so far ahead of its time, and 10 years later VisiCalc implemented its spreadsheet on Apple's microcomputer - popularizing spreadsheets at a consumer level. So Yes, Rich Harris got it