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From: -hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: MS Excel Working As Designed
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:57:51 -0500
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On 1/17/25 11:34 PM, Tyrone wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2025 at 9:57:41 PM EST, "-hh" wrote:
> 
>> Makes sense, even before contemplating if their original choice was
>> motivated because of how limited memory/storage/etc was in that era, or
>> just a lack of sophistication on leap year rules ... or both, since it
>> was decades prior to Y2K awareness.
> 
> VisiCalc required only 32K in the Apple II. 32K. Which meant that the DOS,
> Visicalc and your spreadsheet had to fit in 32K.

Yup, what I was alluding to.  I do recall reading a Apple ][ reference 
book in that era where it had described the boot-up process .. IIRC, it 
was something like that Apple DOS actually consisted of 3 DOS's due to 
hardware limitations.  The first one was that the ROMs were so small 
that the floppy drive was only smart enough to read one track on the 
disk, so the first DOS was instructions to read more of the floppy disk.

The second part did something more (I forget the description), and the 
third part was the actual 'full' DOS for operating the whole system.

> Even in 1979, correctly handling dates in 1900 was not a priority. No one is
> going to go over and above to handle all scenarios with 32K to work with.

True, back in that era, the concept of working extensively with dates 
(especially backdating) was probably well beyond the originally intended 
scope of VisiCalc.
I can recall seeing an Apple ][ with VisiCalc in our office in this 
pre-IBM PC era ... IIRC, for navigating between cells, thumbing the 
space bar changed the arrows keys from <left/right> to <up/down>.

-hh