Dan Bricklin's essay on what makes the iPad feel 'magical' might very well be the first essay on that topic that draws a parallel between the directness and immediacy of the iPad interface and the experience of using a spreadsheet for the first time:

30+ years ago, when I developed VisiCalc, the first personal computer spreadsheet as we know them today, I was challenged to displace paper, pencil, and a calculator. I had to make the electronic version easy and natural enough to use that you'd use it instead of the paper version, even if you thought you'd only do the calculations once. I ended up giving the accountant, business person, planner, and others a feeling of control of their data and calculations that they didn't have before with paper. The thrill of control that a good car racing program gives the user became the thrill of control to the MBA planning a marketing campaign on a limited budget.

I can totally understand what Bricklin is getting at there. It's all too easy to forget now, just over thirty years later, how freeing it was to be able to throw numbers together quickly, easily and – crucially – without the need to learn a programming language.¹

1. In principle, stringing together spreadsheet functions is a limited form of computer programming. Nontheless, I think it's safe to say that VisiCalc and its successors radically lowered the barriers to (data) entry and greatly enhanced the ability of non-programmers to extract useful information from raw data. ↩

Should I be worried that when I read the story of Cell 24Z my first reaction was to start thinking about a more efficient, less opaque way to write that function?