Created: 2026.04.30
In 1981, 2 years after Visicalc was created.
I was working for Dr. Silver at the University of Calgary as his research assistant, he was at the time 'head of research' for the University of Calgary. I was in 2nd year university, I had a 'grad' office - because 'computers' were a fairly new skill that I had the good fortune to have had a nack for. I also had, as one of my students, one of my High School teachers - Mr. Applebee. He was a bright student that I enjoyed teaching.
We had a beta version of a new version of Visicalc, that I ran on my Apple IIe computer with my amber monitor and a dot matrix printer.
I was able to write a program in Visicalc, that took only 7 to 9 hours to run. We used this program to test the hypothesis of the paper. I was extremely privileged to have been named on the paper under Dr. Silver's name. I didn't recognize the extent of the honour at the time, but I came to greatly appreciate it in later years when I was named on some other papers and had a Dr. friend of mine explain to me what that meant.
I went on to work for Dr. Silver in my remaining 2 years of University (BComm, MIS major) and always found him to be a delight to work for. I was named on a couple other papers under him. It was both a privileged and a great learning experience to work on his team as his assistant.