There were two killer apps of the early personal computer era. Not games, not at first: in the late 1970s games were still mainly the province of coin-operated cabinets in the arcades or tele vision consoles like the Atari 2600. No, most people who brought home a home computer did so for one of two reasons: spreadsheets or word processing. VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program which debuted in 1979 for the Apple II, quickly sold several hundred thousand copies; indeed, its availability helped drive sales of the Apple computer itself. Its conception was influenced by the kind of early computer generated imagery then on the big screen in films like Star Wars, particularly the “heads-up” combat displays: “Like Luke Skywalker jumping into the turret of the Millennium Falcon, [Dan] Bricklin saw himself blasting out financials, locking onto profit and loss numbers that would appear suspended in space before him,” wrote one commentator, tongue not entirely in cheek. “It was to be a business tool cum video game, a Saturday Night Special for M.B.A.s.” Journalist Steven Levy described the competitive culture that would arise around VisiCalc hacks and tricks, the quest for the “perfect” spreadsheet: “Spreadsheet hackers lose themselves in the world of what-if,” he wrote. Spreadsheets indeed lent themselves to speculation and scenario-spinning, to a future-oriented fugue state induced by the rows and columns scrolling past, figures rippling across the screen as fingertips adjusted a variable in a hidden formula. Not incidentally perhaps, all of the spreadsheet “cowboys” (his word) Levy describes in his article are male.