Episode 62: Whats is the Killer App?

Show Notes

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Robert Cairns here. Thanks for joining us for the SDM show. The STM show is a product of studying digital marketing.com, the digital marketing agency that will help fulfill all your digital marketing needs, including web design, PPC, campaigns, branding and more, please come see us. And while you’re visiting our website, stunning digital marketing.com. Please sign up for your free marketing newsletter. This includes tips, tricks, and things to help you succeed in the digital world in business, marketing, life, WordPress and more. With promising our newsletter, no hard sales, and there is no credit card required. Now please sit back and relax and join us for this week’s podcast episode. I’m the CEO and Chief creator of amazing ideas to stunning digital marketing.com. I hope everybody’s having an amazing week. This week, I really wanted to have some fun with this podcast, and share with you some personal things in the world of technology, and share with you some things that I’ve done in the past and where it’s kind of brought us today. As many of you know, I’ve been involved with technology and computers for a long time, actually, I started back in high school. And that was thanks to my late father. And I really enjoyed it. And frankly, computers kept me in school, which is a good thing. I originally wrote code, and I even use punch cards. And that’s something many of the generation days probably never done this use punch cards to get code into the computer. An old trick we used to do was number punch cards on the back of the menu order of our programs, or the tasks that was going to happen that way. If you dropped your punch cards, frankly, you could reorder them quickly. And it was something I learned from an old high school instructor. Well, he had one student who was a bit of a smartass. And frankly, he didn’t believe in numbering his punch cards. He said he did work himself out of anything till One day, he stepped out to go to the washroom and a good friend of mine, took his punch card deck, probably 100 cards and played. Let’s shuffle the cards. Well, needless to say it took him about a couple weeks just to figure out what order those cards should have been in. Oh, well, if you’re taking the time and learned, you know, it’s funny at the time, but it’s probably really mean thing that was done at that time. Anyway, today, I wanted to talk about really, after a little bit of a story on what the first killer app was. We all hear this expression, oh, that’s the killer app. That’s the app I gotta have. Well, there was one app in the history of that computer that made the original Apple to succeed, the apple two plus. And then on to today’s PCs, and today’s computers that we use now. Well, originally, when big mainframes were developed, they were developed to number crunch. And the personal computer was no different. The first killer app was an app called visicalc. And visicalc came out for the apple two and the apple two plus. And what it was was the first spreadsheet. My dad was a company Treasurer today would have been called the CFO, same functionality. And he used visicalc back in his business, to crunch numbers for reports. And that was the first killer app. And without visicalc without spreadsheets, frankly, the personal computer never would have taken off the way it has been. We wouldn’t be where we are today. Yeah, we have all these cool apps like Photoshop and video editors. But when it came down to it back then it was all numbers. And after visicalc it defaults to sun. And the second killer app was for the IBM MS DOS days. And that was a program called Lotus 123 owned originally by Lotus Corp eventually sold to IBM. And Lotus was just a more enhanced spreadsheet.

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So that’s killer app number two. And as we go along in this process Lotus devout the sun Which was the grandson of visicalc. And that was made by a company called Microsoft. And what did Microsoft create?

05:11

Excel.

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And Excel is the spreadsheet that many, many people use today in the business. Yeah, there’s Google cow party, Google Docs and other spreadsheets out there. But the key business, Excel is key. And out of these three apps on the XL is still produced in a visicalc on Lotus 123 have gone to the computer grades. And frankly, you know, we owe a lot to these developers who develop these three apps, because without them, I truly don’t believe the personal computer would be where we are today. I should tell you that what really mattered back then, was data manipulation. And frankly, that’s what computers do really well. number crunching now, on my shelf is a turn around my home office. I still send the original physical box and the media. I still have from when my dad got it. And that reminds me every day. What that means in the history computers visicalc should be in the computer software Hall of Fame, no question, because without it we wouldn’t be where we are with personal computers. hope y’all enjoyed this little trip down memory lane I’m taking with it. And I’m gonna do some more nice just for fun because I love talking about the history and where the business has been. Where computer systems as hosts the podcast brought to you by stunning digital marketing. jump on over to stunning digital marketing comm to sign up for your free marketing business, WordPress and life newsletter. It’s 100% free, will never ask you for a credit

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card and will never

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put a hard sell in the newsletter. We might promote some products occasionally from some of our friends. This podcast is dedicated to my late father Bruce Cairns. Keeping your feet on the ground. Keep reaching for the stars.