Archival footage from the early 1980s has this distinct, almost palpable texture to it. For members of Generation X, it brings memories of Donkey Kong, He-Man, and Star Wars. The colors are slightly washed out, the audio hums with the analog hiss of magnetic tape, and the people on screen seem entirely unaware that they are standing at the edge of technological history. This is particularly true of this month’s Vidéothèque entry: there is an added, inescapable layer to the viewing experience: the absolute, crushing weight of dramatic irony. Brace for impact.
In this edition we look back at a staff meeting at Software Arts, held on August 12, 1981, almost precisely 45 years ago. The speaker is Software Arts (not to be mixed with Electronic Arts!) co-founder Dan Bricklin. The full transcript of the staff meeting has been available on Dan Bricklin’s personal homepage for the past 24 years at least, as the Internet Archive dutifully remembers.
The room where the staff met was hot; they complained about the rising temperature right at the beginning, but the heat was nothing compared to the news being delivered. On this precise day, IBM announced its model 5150, the OG Personal Computer. And Software Arts, the creators of VisiCalc, were holding the “Killer App” for the IBM PC… or so they thought.
What makes this (otherwise rather boring) video captivating is not merely the juxtaposition of a scrappy hacker culture colliding with the monolithic, suit-and-tie presence of International Business Machines. It is the knowledge of what happens next.
Bricklin reads a letter from IBM addressed to him and his co-founder, Bob Frankston. The corporate speak is thick. IBM politely but firmly reminds them of their “confidential disclosure” agreements, forbidding them from divulging technical specifications beyond what the Boca Raton IBM Labs have officially sanctioned. The Software Arts team sits in that stuffy room, looking at photocopied press releases and marveling at the marketing brochures, brimming with the pride of having the unquestioned “killer application” bundled with the most important piece of hardware of the decade.
They are celebrating their ascension to the throne. They do not realize they are reading their obituary.
By porting their fundamentally 8-bit application to IBM’s new 16-bit architecture without significantly rewriting it to take advantage of the expanded memory and speed, VisiCalc left the door wide open. Just over a year later, a former VisiCorp product manager named Mitch Kapor would release Lotus 1-2-3. Written directly in x86 assembly to ruthlessly exploit the IBM PC’s hardware, Lotus would make VisiCalc look like a sluggish, archaic toy. VisiCalc’s sales would flatline almost overnight.
But wait a second: did I not just publish an article in this very edition that literally enumerates rewriting as one of the “App Killer” factors? Well, yes, but in some cases app rewritings were required; if not in version 1.0, in version 1.1, particularly when you have such technological transitions as the one witnessed in August 1981. Of course, it is easy to pass judgment in hindsight… 45 years after the facts. Anyway, I digress, as usual. Who knows what history would have been like if VisiCalc had made it to the 1990s? Would our accountants be calculating our taxes with “VisiCalc for Windows 2026” today?
Back to Software Arts. As the meeting unfolds, Bricklin reads off the software lineup for the new machine: a BASIC interpreter from Microsoft, a word-processing app called EasyWriter, and an accounting package from Peachtree. Such was the primordial soup of a new computer back in the day. Neither Doom nor Pascal nor Facebook nor ChatGPT were “Killing Apps” yet in the collective psyche.
The deepest irony arrives precisely at minute 7:06, when Bricklin highlights IBM’s “groundbreaking decision” to open a software publishing department to consider user-generated programs and third-party software. He reads this as an exciting curiosity. In reality, it was the death knell of the closed-silo computing appliance. IBM was building an open platform, and an open platform has no loyalty to its launch titles. The very ecosystem that Software Arts was helping to legitimize was the exact mechanism that would allow their competitors to bypass them entirely.
Pause at minute 10:28 and pay attention to the marketing materials they pass around, featuring a bizarre stock photo of a wife adoringly holding onto her husband as a child plays on the PC, accompanied by pictures of cows meant to represent VisiCalc. They laugh at the marketing department’s clumsy attempts to visualize software. They are dissecting the marketing of a product that they believe guarantees their future, entirely blind to the fact that the IBM PC was merely a vessel for their impending obsolescence.
We often look back at the history of startup culture through the lens of polished retrospectives and survivorship bias. We read about the early days of computing and imagine a clean, inevitable trajectory where the pioneers always reap the rewards of their labor. This video shatters that illusion. It is a beautiful, unvarnished, and quietly tragic look at the exact moment a company reached its absolute zenith. Look at them: they are sitting in a sweltering room in 1981, laughing, smiling, and holding the future in their hands, blissfully unaware of the plans the future was already making to leave them behind.
VisiCalc, their own quintessential “Killer App,” the one that quite rightfully defined a whole generation of computers, was about to be murdered and rendered obsolete in that savage, never-ending ritual of the software industry. I just read again this last phrase, and I cannot believe how corny it sounds, but so be it. I like corny.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.