Robert (Bob) M. Frankston (born June 14, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York) is the co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it.
Wolverton has written other computer books, addressing MS-DOS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows, WordPerfect, Netscape FastTrack, VisiCalc, QBasic and more.
Triumph of the Nerds, A documentary hosted by Robert X. Cringely that featured the creators of VisiCalc and their contribution as the first killer app for the personal computer.
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According to Bricklin, he was watching a professor at Harvard Business School create a financial model on a blackboard.
Daniel Singer "Dan" Bricklin (born 16 July 1951), often referred to as “The Father of the Spreadsheet”, is the American co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program.
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Bricklin has appeared in the 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds, as well as the 2005 documentary Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, in both cases discussing the development of VisiCalc.
The company distributed T/Maker (written by Peter Roizen), one of the first spreadsheet programs designed for the personal computer user, which went a step beyond the similar VisiCalc program by offering text-processing capability.
His version, Lotus 1-2-3, would go on to be an even greater success than VisiCalc, in no small part due to the fact that it ran on, and was tuned for, the new IBM PC.
Software Arts was a software company founded by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979 to develop VisiCalc, which was published by a separate company, Personal Software Inc. (later named VisiCorp).
Both companies drew criticism, since key elements of their look and feel had been introduced earlier by VisiCalc and Xerox.
Invented by Milos Konopasek in the late 1970s and initially developed in 1982 by Software Arts, the company behind VisiCalc, TK Solver was acquired by Universal Technical Systems in 1984 after Software Arts fell into financial difficulty and was sold to Lotus Software.