"When the spreadsheet launched in 1979, it was a bewildering piece of software. People had no idea what they were looking at. A computer screen, filled with a grid of numbers? As Keith Houston explains in his new history of the pocket calculator, Empire of the Sum, they hadn’t realised that the rows and columns of a spreadsheet could be functional rather than decorative."

https://www.ft.com/content/c5f7909f-0bac-40fa-b5a8-ff34c38b89a9