INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Dan Bricklin, inventor of the first spreadsheet
In 1978, a
Harvard Business School student named Dan Bricklin was sitting in a classroom, watching his accounting lecturer filling in rows and columns
Every time the lecturer changed a figure, he had to work down and across the grid on the board, erasing and rewriting other numbers to make
everything add up, just as accounting clerks all over the world did every day in the pages of their ledgers
It's boring and repetitive work
A two-page spread across the open fold of the ledger is called a "spreadsheet"
The output of several paper spreadsheets provides the input for larger, master spreadsheets
Changing any of the data in that chain might mean hours of work with a pencil, rubber, and a calculator.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage
caption
Bookkeeper Teruko Kiyomura pictured manually updating various ledgers
Like many business school
students, Mr Bricklin had had a real job before going to Harvard - he'd worked as a programmer at Wang and DEC, two big players in 1970s
Why on Earth would anyone do this on a blackboard or paper ledger, he wondered, when you could do it on a computer instead
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy highlights the inventions, ideas and innovations that helped create the economic world.It is
broadcast on the TheIndianSubcontinent World Service
You can listen to all the episodes online or subscribe to the programme podcast.So he wrote a program for the new Apple II personal
computer: an electronic spreadsheet
His friend Bob Frankston helped him sharpen up the software - and, on 17 October 1979, VisiCalc went on sale
Almost overnight, it was a sensation.Image copyrightIBM/1979 Software Arts, IncOther financial and accounting programs had long existed but
VisiCalc was the first with the modern spreadsheet interface
It is widely thought to be the first "killer app", a software program so essential that you'd buy a computer just to be able to use it
As Mr Bricklin notes on his website, Steve Jobs later acknowledged that VisiCalc had "propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved"
Within a few years, many accountants and business owners divided their professional experience into two periods: before and after the advent
of the electronic spreadsheet.Image copyrightDan BricklinUnsurprisingly, it wasn't long before VisiCalc had a new and powerful rival: Lotus
By 1988, the New York Times reported that Lotus had dominated the spreadsheet market for five years, after toppling VisiCalc "whose dominant
share of the personal computer market seemed invincible"
How the mighty were humbled.The New York Times also described several other upstart challengers, including a program called Microsoft Excel
But the real lesson of the spreadsheet is not about how monopolies rise and fall but about how technology changes things
It's a cliche that the robots are coming for our jobs
Image copyrightGetty ImagesBut the story is never as simple as that, as the digital spreadsheet proves
If the concept of a robot accountant means anything, surely it means VisiCalc or Excel
These programs put hundreds of thousands of accounting clerks out of work
Of course VisiCalc was revolutionary
Of course it was more efficient than a human
According to the Planet Money podcast, in the US alone, there are 400,000 fewer accounting clerks today than in 1980, the first full year
that VisiCalc went on sale
But Planet Money also found that there were 600,000 more jobs for regular accountants
After all, crunching numbers had become cheaper, more versatile, and more powerful, so demand went up.The point is not really whether
600,000 is more than 400,000: sometimes automation creates jobs and sometimes it destroys them
The point is that automation reshapes the workplace in much subtler ways than "a robot took my job".Image caption
Technology has transformed the jobs of New York Stock Exchange traders such as Lauren Simmons
In the age of the spreadsheet,
the repetitive, routine parts of accountancy disappeared
What remained - and indeed flourished - required more judgement, more human skills
The spreadsheet created whole new industries
There are countless jobs in high finance that depend on exploring different numerical scenarios - tweaking the numbers and watching the
columns recalculate themselves
These jobs barely existed before the electronic spreadsheet
I've written before about the Jennifer Unit, an earpiece that directs warehouse pickers to collect products by breaking down instructions
into the most mindless, idiot-proof steps
Image copyrightLucas SystemsImage caption
The voice-directed Jennifer Unit tells workers how best to carry out their
tasks
The Jennifer Unit strips a menial task of its last faintly interesting element
The spreadsheet operates in reverse: it strips an intellectually demanding job of the most boring bits
Viewed together, the two technologies show that technology doesn't usually take jobs wholesale - it chisels away the easily automated
chunks, leaving humans to adapt to the rest
That can make the human job more interesting, or more soul-destroying - it all depends.In accountancy, it made the human jobs more creative
The histories of accountancy that I've read don't bother to mention VisiCalc or Excel
Perhaps it seems beneath their dignity
What the spreadsheet did to accounting and finance is a harbinger of what is coming to other white-collar jobs
Grace Hopper's compiler: Computing's hidden heroJust Google it: The student project that changed the worldHow the world's first
accountants counted on cuneiform Managing the managers: The rise of the business 'philosopher-kings' Algorithms can churn out routine
stories about corporate earnings reports more quickly and cheaply than human journalists
Some teachers use online tutorials to quiz pupils to identify where they are getting stuck before helping them progress
A doctor can sometimes be replaced by a diagnostic app
Robotic surgery is increasingly common and can allow greater precision, flexibility and control than conventional techniques.Law firms use
"document assembly systems" that quiz clients and then draft customised legal contracts
It is hard to conclude this trend won't continue across other sectors
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
A surgeon (left) uses a da Vinci surgical robot, controlled by a console, to
perform a hysterectomy
But we shouldn't ignore the other cautionary tale the spreadsheet has to offer
We may think we have delegated a routine job to an infallible computer - but in fact we've simply acquired a lever with which to magnify
human error to a dramatic scale
Consider the time when unsuccessful applicants for a senior police job were told they'd been offered the job: that's what happens when you
sort one column without sorting the adjacent one
Or the time two noted economists, Carmen Reinhart and the former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff, were mightily embarrassed when a graduate
student spotted a spreadsheet error in an influential economics paper
Reinhart and Rogoff accidentally omitted several countries because they forgot to drag down the formula selection box by five more cells
being divided not by an average of two numbers but by their sum - making the risks look half as big as they should have done
If we ask computers to do the wrong thing, they'll do it with the same breathtaking speed and efficiency that inspired Dan Bricklin to
That is a lesson we seem doomed to keep learning far beyond the borders of accountancy.The author writes the Financial Times's Undercover
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy is broadcast on the TheIndianSubcontinent World Service
You can listen to all the episodes online or subscribe to the programme podcast.
