Inventor of the modern Electronic
SpreadSheet.
An unacknowledged savior of Apple. At a time when Apple was losing market share, and with their sales in a slump, Dan Bricklin and (mostly coded by)
BobFrankston (together,
SoftwareArts), brought forth a program that allowed a decidedly plastic modeling of numbers, interactively, on a computer monitor.
One of the direct effects of this was that people bought
AppleComputers just to run
VisiCalc. This program drove a sales recovery for Apple, but I don't ever recall having seen an acknowledgement from Apple to that effect.
VisiCalc was the second of the "big three" must-have applications that justified personal computing: 1) the
WordProcessor [
WordStar,
MagicWand,
WordPerfect], 2) the
SpreadSheet [
VisiCalc,
SuperCalc, Lotus123] 3) the desktop
DataBase [dBASE II, Paradox].
With those three things available to Joe Everyman, personal computing was from then on lodged firmly in the world of business.
CategoryPerson? (A category isn't consistently applied to such folk.)