It was so long ago that I got fed up with the glacial slowness of commercial software development, and wrote a public-domain text-processing program. The premise was that spreadsheets were namby-pamby things, and that what one really needed was something that would process text as if it were a spreadsheet. Everybody knows that numbers in a column in a fixed space font are a column. Why bother with a spreadsheet? It was much easier to produce data and formulas as a text file and get a nice little application to execute the formulas etc. Once the idea came to me in a flash, a friend and I wrote it in a joyous frenzy. we ended up that could do almost anything that the rather primitive spreadsheets of the time would do. You’ll be surprised to hear it was a huge success. A whole underclass who couldn’t afford fancy computers with spreadsheets took to it instantly. It was used to prepare invoices, school reports, cashbooks, and even entire accounting packages. We then were besieged with people wanting advice, help and support. Nobody ever found a bug, mercifully, but they wanted advice on making spreadsheets. We politely told them that, whilst the software itself was our gift to humanity, our generosity didn’t extend to writing applications for them as well. As a result, businesses that were essentially cash-poor offered to trade stuff. Parcels would arrive with all sorts of interesting things; food, gadgets, and so on. The best payer was a clothes manufacturer in the Midlands who built an entire accounting system out of the package. I ended up with an entire wardrobe, and didn’t have to buy another pair of trousers for years. I always looked slightly bedraggled because the quality of the materials was awful. As the storm-clouds in the monetary system gather, I wonder if we’ll go back to this sort of trading. It makes support-calls interesting as one has to agree the fee on the spur of the moment, based on what they have to trade. Software would have presented commercial difficulties in the Bronze Age.