[HN Gopher] Introduction to Microsoft Excel (1992) [video]
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Introduction to Microsoft Excel (1992) [video]
Author : belter
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-05-14 20:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| dungholepoopie wrote:
| Remember when you used to own the software?
| wayne wrote:
| I coincidentally watched this video yesterday for the first time
| because it showed up in a YouTube recommendation. It got me
| thinking about how old videos like this go viral on YouTube.
| Maybe a lot of people started commenting on it, which boosts its
| ranking and visibility in recommendations, and it snowballs from
| there?
| LordAtlas wrote:
| It was posted on Reddit a few days ago and got a lot of traffic
| and comments.
| nojito wrote:
| Was posted to Reddit 2 days ago.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/uoyhr0/old_m...
| flint wrote:
| Excel is the most important piece of software ever written
| HomeGear wrote:
| I'd agree that it's in the top 3 non-kernel/os pieces of
| software. The part it plays in finance, accounting, and
| engineering is staggering.
| webwanderings wrote:
| Bill Gates gave the world Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc, so the
| humanity could become creative, educated and thriving.
| Zuckerberg gave the world social media and the world became ...
| teekert wrote:
| Hmm I get the point, still PowerPointing is always use as a
| term for "not really doing any work". I guess it is because
| it always to try to explain to our businesses what could work
| and you have to do a lot before something catches on. Yeah I
| know, little vision in our business.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Maybe visicalc, but not excel.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| My spreadsheet doesn't do that.
| teekert wrote:
| So, this is progress made visible? 2 guys in business suits
| impress their boss with what are now 12y/o skills?
| bjarneh wrote:
| I think that's exactly how most business projections are made...
| webwanderings wrote:
| It's obvious they were competing with other spreadsheets of their
| time (QuattroPro).
| blihp wrote:
| Lotus 1-2-3 was still king of the (spreadsheet) hill back then.
| Borland was trying to compete but could never get their act
| together.
| webwanderings wrote:
| Lotus 1-2-3's UI was nowhere modern/polished as QuattroPro.
| Of course they had a hold of the user base.
| Zebfross wrote:
| Semi-related, but if you haven't seen Joel Spolsky's Excel crash
| course, it's the best Excel video a I've ever seen:
| https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c
| cm2187 wrote:
| The sad thing is how little it improved 1992-2022 (well 1998-2022
| to be fair).
| open-source-ux wrote:
| _The sad thing is how little it improved_
|
| Lotus tried to re-think spreadsheets with a product called
| _Improv_ - it was full of good ideas but the product never took
| off. The product launched on NeXTSTEP in 1991 and then on
| Windows in 1993.
|
| Here's a 1990 sales video (low-resolution) from Lotus
| explaining how it works, and how it differs from traditional
| spreadsheets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M
| blihp wrote:
| It actually improved quite a bit until Excel 97. By then the
| competition was dead, so they no longer needed to try.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Everything after the ribbon was garbage. They changed it, for
| worse, to sell new copies.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I suspect it's more that the features you would use haven't
| changed much.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The premise of the ad seems quite funny to me. It's like they
| wanted to include the thing figuring out the patterns (I was a
| little impressed to see Q1, Q2, etc, but it would be nice to see
| it roll over to the next year as Q1 not Q5) but they somehow
| ended up with the excel-using businessman seeming to make up(?)
| some numbers for an important report and then project them
| linearly which doesn't feel like the best message ever. Though
| they probably didn't have enough time for someone to do a better
| job of modelling (if someone were doing it very quickly they
| probably couldn't explain or show off drag and drop or toolbar
| buttons).
| blihp wrote:
| Back then their competition was Lotus 1-2-3. What they were
| showing was that they had some basic automation for some common
| tasks (autofill, auto calculations, auto formatting) while
| everyone who was coming from Lotus, their target customer, knew
| how manual and tedious this kind of thing was to do. Plus the
| UI in Lotus was only slightly less convoluted than Emacs.
|
| The part they should have shown was how you could have large,
| complex (for the time) spreadsheets and not run out of memory
| which was a significant advantage they had back then as DOS
| applications had serious memory constraints even with extended
| memory. A lot of heavy spreadsheet users switched to Excel for
| that feature alone.
| jchw wrote:
| While the ad isn't _that_ impressive, I'm mainly just impressed
| by how much of the important functionality of Excel was already
| figured out by 1992. I expected formulas and at least some decent
| formatting and editing tools, but I was not expecting
| interpolation, what appears to be the most important custom
| number formatting features still today, and the automatic table
| styling. That all already existed and was in an advertisement
| before I was even born.
|
| Pretty cool.
|
| (I know a lot of the innovation came earlier with software like
| VisiCalc, but that's distant enough to be hard for me to
| appreciate.)
| tester756 wrote:
| Very cool ad
|
| my top3 right after
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-VvFlwsWic Introducing Microsoft
| Surface Studio
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zLsUhOCqyU Coinbase Super Bowl
| Commercial.
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