On May 2, 1985, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs held a joint press conference at Tavern on the Green, the famous restaurant in New York City’s Central Park. The co-founders of Microsoft and Apple, respectively, announced the forthcoming release of Excel, Microsoft’s newest spreadsheet program for Apple’s Macintosh. This wasn’t Microsoft’s first spreadsheet. Three years earlier, in 1982, Microsoft released Multiplan. But it had failed to gain market share against the dominant Lotus 1-2-3. So Gates decided to cede the traditional spreadsheet market to Lotus and refocus Microsoft’s efforts on the Macintosh’s graphical user interface.

In 1978, Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin started thinking about creating an electronic spreadsheet program. That summer, Bricklin decided to try and make his idea a reality. He developed a prototype on an Apple II that he borrowed from Dan Fylstra, who had received his own Harvard MBA the year before and founded a company called Personal Software.

After completing the prototype and showing it to Fylstra, Personal Software agreed to publish the program. Bricklin and a fellow programmer, Bob Frankston, formed their own company, Software Arts, to serve as the developer. Personal Software would then handle marketing and sales and pay royalties to Software Arts.