Dan Bricklin is the American software designer best known as the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program. While studying for an MBA at Harvard Business School in the late 1970s, Bricklin conceived of a program that would let a person manipulate a grid of numbers on a screen and have dependent calculations update automatically. He described this in his own firsthand writing at bricklin.com, where he maintains a detailed history of the program from the perspective of one of the people who made it.
Bricklin designed VisiCalc and partnered with Bob Frankston, a skilled programmer, to implement it. The two founded Software Arts to build the product, which was published in 1979 by Personal Software (later VisiCorp). Bricklin has consistently credited the implementation to Frankston and framed his own role as the designer of the concept and the user interaction, a distinction he is careful to preserve on his site.
A frequently cited point about Bricklin is that he did not patent the spreadsheet. He has written that software patents were uncommon and difficult to obtain at the time, and that the idea therefore entered the public domain of practice, allowing competitors such as Lotus and later Microsoft to build their own spreadsheets freely. Whether that openness helped the category grow or cost Bricklin a fortune is a question he discusses candidly in his own retrospectives.
Because VisiCalc established the entire spreadsheet category and is the textbook example of a killer application, Bricklin is commonly called the father of the spreadsheet. His work tied a specific, widely useful piece of software to the early personal computer market and gave ordinary business users a reason to buy machines like the Apple II.
Beyond VisiCalc, Bricklin continued working in software for decades, founding companies and building other tools, and he became a recognized voice on the history and ethics of software through his writing and public talks. His personal site remains a primary firsthand source on the origins of the spreadsheet.