Dan Bricklin

Daniel Singer Bricklin, born in 1951, is an American software engineer and entrepreneur best known as the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program widely available for home and office computers. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, and conceived the spreadsheet while earning an MBA at Harvard Business School. In 1979 he and Frankston founded Software Arts, of which he was chairman until it was acquired by Lotus in 1985. He then founded Software Garden, co-founded Slate Corporation in 1990, and in 1995 founded Trellix Corporation, a web publishing software company that Interland bought in 2003. He later became chief technology officer of Alpha Software. His honours include the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1981, the IEEE Computer Society Computer Entrepreneur Award in 1996, and election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003.