Wired Blog: This-Day-In-Tech. 26-Jan-1983: Spreadsheet as Easy as 1-2-3.
1983: Lotus begins selling its spreadsheet application for Microsoft DOS, called 1-2-3.
1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet application — it was preceded by VisiCalc. But 1-2-3 quickly became the most popular, helping to boost sales of IBM PCs and PC clones.
Spreadsheet software, now dominated by MS Excel, seems rather boring, but still common place, today. Even criticized, also in quant finance - Why Good Spreadsheets Make Bad Decisions .
But they are convenient front-ends to do quick scenario tests and represent some working dynamics in workbooks. The document centered paradigm is also not a bad approach for deployment.
The UnRisk PRICING ENGINE comes with instant instruments in a Mathematica and an Excel front-end. With built-in parallel computing it comes standard with computational kernels over multi-core architectures or grids. To exploit this parallelism also from the Excel front-end we written a quite clever UnRisk Link for Excel that links UnRisk functions in the Mathematica front-end into the UnRisk Excel workbooks.
Portfolio-across-scenario runs in Excel apply valuations in parallel.
