Origin of the Spreadsheet

Monday, 25 June 2007

Welcome to this blog created 25 June 2007

The image at the top of this blog is a picture of the Rock Savage chemical plant at ICI Runcorn, Cheshire. There are many chemical plants located here and they were all linked by a system known as "The Works Records System" which was in fact a spreadsheet in all but name. Not only that, it was in many ways more advanced than the first PC spreadsheet which appeared six years later for the PC. Data could be extracted from one application and fed into "later" applications in a cascading fashion. Data was preserved and accumulated by day/week/month or year and could be displayed however the user desired with data cells being connected by mathematical formulae keyed in by non-programmers.
The system went live in 1974 and was in continual use in the chemical plants such as the "Castner-Kelner" plant until 2001 without any change to the underlying software which remained bug free.

This blog was created to publish the details of what was, in all likelihood, the first ever online and interactive, spreadsheet. It was called "The Works Records System" and was designed in the early 1970's by Bob Mais, one time employee of ICI Mond Division, located at Northwich, Cheshire, England. Much of this information was originally posted to Wikipedia within the "Spreadsheet" article. Unfortunately because of Wikipedia's policy of "no original research" and "unreferenced claims", it has been or is being removed. There also appears to be some concern by Dan Bricklin that the prior existence of the Works Records System appears to undermine the claim that Visicalc was the first interactive spreadsheet. It certainly appears to be the case - and is not disputed - that Visicalc was the first commercial spreadsheet for the PC. Additional claims however that it was the first (or first interactive) spreadsheet are less clear and Visicalc most certainly was not a publicly "shareable" spreadsheet. Although the Works Records System performed many of the functions expected of today's spreadsheets, there were naturally differences in implementation. "Cells" were not referenced by Row & Column but instead used a unique reference throughout all the applications. Thus, data values from other remote applications could be "imported" from those applications dynamically. Data cells could be ascribed "attributes" such as "units" (pounds/ kilograms) and there were built-in checks to ensure that "columns" of mismatched units were not summed in error. Unlike todays spreadsheets, historical data was stored by time periods and automatically accumulated for larger periods. Screen layouts were decided & created entirely by chemical plant engineers or operators who knew nothing of programming but were aware of the relationships between data items. The relationships were described in mathematical formulae which linked "cells" (data items) to each other. All the programming was actually performed in IBM Assembler language and used a technique now known as "Just in time compilation (JIT)" where machine code was dynamically built on first encounter and stored for later use. IBM's flagship teleprocessing monitor "CICS" was used for communicating with the 3270 terminals chosen for the implementation.

Origin of the Spreadsheet

Monday, 25 June 2007

Welcome to this blog created 25 June 2007

The ICI Works Records System

Origin of the Spreadsheet

Commercial shared public spreadsheets

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