While there are many sites that say this, I do not believe it to be true…
I sold and serviced Apple ][ computers during that period of time, and AppleSoft Basic was NOT compiled at that point in history, and Visicalc had a much smaller memory footprint.
In the early 80’s I had a bank as a client… I developed a HUGE Visicalc spreadsheet for them… It worked great… just took 1/2 hour to load and another 1/2 hour to save …
Hey Excel is much more complex than most people realize.
It only took a little time to whip up the demo I did above. I simply did it for an entertaining exercise as I really have no use for it.
Excel on the other hand is very powerful. Copy, Paste, Move, Fill (intelligent filling), Formulas, Formatting, Printing, Scripting. It’s simply an awesome tool that I wouldn’t even think of copying. Last night I was working simultaneously on seven spreadsheets (workbooks). The largest one had 177 columns and 66,391 rows. I manipulated the data using formulas and macros to lookup values in various workbooks and calculate results.
And to think Microsoft almost got buried when a bug in Excel (that still exists), cost some pretty big names billions of $$$… that no longer use Excel 
One example : http://goingconcern.com/has-microsoft-excel-ruined-world/
Hey! I just figured it out… The US isn’t 18.9 Trillion in debt, it’s all a spreadsheet error :-p
Hey that looks like a bug in the formula, not Excel. That’s like one of my users say my app was broke because the quantity field would no longer accept input. Turn the num lock back on silly…
But it would be nice is Xojo had a module with a lot of the math/statistical/financial/etc functions that Excel supports… (It would be nice if Xojo inc added few with each release!)
Complicated Excel spreadsheets are a nightmare to have to maintain/modify/validate… While the combination of cell formulas, conditional formatting and VBA can be made to do a lot, the conglomeration is often a mess!
If Xojo had more of that that type of functionality built in, creating in-house apps that are more reliable and easier to maintain to replace those “mission critical” monstrosities would be a a Lot easier!
That said one would also need something like ChartDirector and the Einhugur PDF (Or DynaPDF) plugin… but having more of the Excel functions alone built in would go a long way!
PS: Before I started with Xojo, I created a monstrosity or 2 myself! 
And no one talked about Excel misuse (done by users).
I recall one user who issue staff notes with Excel
another who use it as DB (and cried after the first sort !) 
Never was (IMHO).
Was Merlin (assembler) in existence then ?
[quote=365758:@Dave S]While there are many sites that say this, I do not believe it to be true…
I sold and serviced Apple ][ computers during that period of time, and AppleSoft Basic was NOT compiled at that point in history, and Visicalc had a much smaller memory footprint.
In the early 80’s I had a bank as a client… I developed a HUGE Visicalc spreadsheet for them… It worked great… just took 1/2 hour to load and another 1/2 hour to save …[/quote]
I happened to see Dan quite a bit at the time, and I saw some bits of source code in AppleSoft Basic. When the PC came around, he ported it to IBM PC’s BASICA extremely quickly, which definitely looks like he was indeed in Basic.
That said, if I remember right Beagle Brothers had a compiler for AppleSoft Basic right or around 1981.
And of course there was a compiler for BASICA by the end of the eighties, maybe earlier internally at IBM.
You should link the Source @Dave S : http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Software/Visicalc.html 