Dan Bricklin, who I had the great pleasure to meet at DEMO@15 earlier this year, has taken the wraps off of a new project he calls wikiCalc. For the young un's out there, Dan is the "father of the spreadhseet" - the developer of VisiCalc, one of the first truly disruptive bits of software in personal computing history and precursor to both Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel. Dan describes wikiCalc as:

"a web authoring tool that creates web pages. It is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data this is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. While you edit using a browser-based UI in a spreadsheet, with the A-B-C 1-2-3 grid showing, the final output, like printout from the productivity product, is static and only shows cell borders where you explicitly set them. It handles freeform text in a wiki-like manner and works well with large blocks of text."

I've posted a short essay here on my blog called "About wikiCalc 0.1" explaining what the program is and why I did it. The program is currently only available as a download for Windows (but will almost certainly be ready for Mac, Linux/Unix, and more at some point soon — it's written in Perl) and only in the client-side version with publishing to any web server that supports FTP. You can find a link to the download and a bit more information on the "wikiCalc Alpha Test Home Page".

Chris Shipley chats with Dan at DEMO@15 in Scottsdale, AZ in February 2005.