An Inexcusable Failure

by Leonard Tramiel

After my first academic year in graduate school, I came home for the summer where I returned to the PET program at Commodore. One of the tasks I was given was to review a box of software that been submitted so that Commodore would sell the software. I didn't recommend that Commodore take any of the software. One piece of software deserves special attention.

I said that this piece of software wasn't worth selling because there was nothing that it could do that couldn't also be done by a nearly trivial BASIC program. One reason for having this view was that nearly all of the discussions that I had had with the people involved in producing the first personal computers centered around the primary use being to learn programming. So I was biased to think that everyone that used a PET would be able to write simple programs. The program I'm talking about was VisiCalc.

I hope you've all stopped laughing by now. There is an interesting "plus" to my idiotic decision. I had the chance to discuss this with one of the authors of VisiCalc. We met at a conference in 2010. It turned out that the same decision was made at Apple so the authors of VisiCalc were forced to start a software distribution business. This was a very good financial decision for them. So good that I was thanked for my mistake.

So I supposed this is an example of "No harm no foul" but ... wow, that was an inexcusable failure.

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