India's nine day tea strike and the birth of the Excel spreadsheet

27:06From January all the way to June 1985, the people of Craddock, they governed themselves, having fought on a daily basis with the apartheid security branches. They also started showing other towns that are surrounding Craddock what those towns needed to do to be able to liberate themselves from the apartheid government. And I think because of that, they were then earmarked to be permanently removed from society. And that is indeed what happened. On the night of the 27th of June 1985, the Cradock Four were driving back from a political meeting when they were stopped at a roadblock. My father and three of his comrades, Matthew Goniwe, Sparum Konto and Sikailum Hlauli, left Craddock to attend a meeting in the city of Port Elizabeth.

28:07The meeting ran a little bit late, so the four of them only got to depart heading towards Craddock at around 9 o 'clock that evening. Around 90 kilometers outside of Port Elizabeth, there was a roadblock set up by both the South African police and the South African Defence Force. My father, Fort, was driving the car. It was here where the Honda Ballade that they were driving in was stopped. My father and his comrades were then kidnapped. There were no eyewitnesses to what happened that night. Two days later, the brutalised bodies of Sparrow Mkonto and Sitelo Hlawuli were discovered near Port Elizabeth.

28:57News of their killings reached Lucanio's mother, Lamonde. Even though two of the four were found dead, she still had hope that maybe my father had escaped. And she tells us that even on the Saturday, she still prepared a plate of food for my dad, but obviously he never came back. They were only informed on the Tuesday when my dad's remains and that of Matthew Goniwe were found. And my mum likes to put it in the way where she says her world became very dark. It's almost as if someone had switched the lights off. And a warning, this next bit contains a graphic description of violence. Their bodies were discovered burnt beyond recognition.

29:48They had multiple stab wounds. My father's ring finger on his left hand had been severed off. The ring that he was wearing was nowhere to be found. His tongue was elongated and parts of his thigh looked as if it had been bitten by a dog because there was a piece of flesh missing.

30:24The funerals of the Kradok Four drew tens of thousands of mourners from across South Africa. Lukanyo was three years old at the time. I remember being really very scared, just by the sheer amount of people. My mum crying a lot, and her telling me when I'd said that we needed to go home because maybe my dad was waiting for us at home. and she told me that my father was in the red box. There's a thing that we do here in South Africa. It's called a toy-toy. It's almost like when people get into like a chant and we're singing struggle songs. It's left, right, left, like almost like a march. Now, if you can imagine 20, 30, 40 ,000 people toy-toying at the same time and that movement shook the ground underneath my feet.

31:21And I can actually still, sometimes, I mean, I can still feel it. The police and apartheid government denied any involvement in the deaths of the Cradock Four. Despite two inquests, no one was ever prosecuted. But a leaked security document later revealed a top-secret order calling for their, quote, permanent removal from society. For Lucanio, that meant growing up without a father. Fathers are meant to give a sense of identity to their sons. So my father was in there to teach me about our family history. What the apartheid police did is that even after my dad had died, they continued to raid our home.

32:05But I felt powerless because how was a seven, eight-year-old boy, How was I meant to protect my mum and my sisters against these grown men who had killed my father, basically? I, Nelson Odisha South Mandela. On the 10th of May 1994, South Africa entered a new era as Nelson Mandela became the country's first black president following its first democratic elections. Just over a year after he was in office, he came to Craddock to lay a wreath at the graves of the Craddock IV and he called them the true heroes of the struggle for liberation. A year later, Mandela set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate apartheid-era crimes and promote national healing.

32:56We were convinced that the government, as led by the African National Congress, would prosecute the people that were responsible for my father and his comrades ending up being buried in red coffins. In 1999, six former police officers sought amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for their role in the deaths of the Craddock Four. It was denied on the grounds that they'd failed to fully disclose the circumstances of the killings, but they were never prosecuted and all have since died. For decades, the Craddock IV families have campaigned for justice and a new inquiry is now underway.

33:38Because we can't prosecute any of the people that were there on the night of 27 June 1985, for us, justice now, I suppose, is having the truth as unadulterated as we can about what happened to my father so that future generations can never dispute what happened to the Craddock Four. The extraordinarily measured recollections of Luc Hanyo, whose father, Fort Collata, was one of the murdered Craddock Four in South Africa 40 years ago. He was speaking to Dan Hardoon. We jump forward a decade now to the United States and the hugely controversial O.J. Simpson case. It was in 1995 that the American football legend and movie star was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

34:32Ron Shipp, a police officer and a former close friend of O.J. Simpson's, decided to testify against him in the criminal trial. In 2017, he spoke to Rebecca Kesby, and a warning, this contains descriptions of the injuries suffered by the victims. When I knew I was going to testify, it was the worst thing in my life that I'd ever been faced with. I mean, I absolutely, positively love the guy. Ron Shipp was from a family of police officers. He first met O.J. Simpson as a schoolboy in 1968, when O.J. was already a star on the football field. And by the 1980s, Ron and his wife were regular visitors to the Simpson household that O.J.

35:16then shared with his second wife, an attractive model, Nicole Brown. As a couple, they were hilarious. And O.J. was the type of person, he made you feel good. You got on really well with Nicole, didn't you? What sort of woman was she? She was fantastic. She was a very funny woman. I mean, I used to watch them together, and they were always joking and goofing off. Like I said, as far as I was concerned, they were the ideal couple. But by 1989, their relationship was in trouble. On New Year's Day, police responded to reports of domestic violence at the Simpson household. Reports showed that Nicole told the police she feared for her life.

35:54She'd been beaten so badly she was hospitalised. She also said she'd called the police eight times before. OJ Simpson pleaded no contest to a charge of spousal abuse and was sentenced to 120 hours community service. But Ron was concerned, particularly because he taught a class on domestic abuse to police officers. He was the first one to tell me that they had some kind of a fight, scuffle, whatever you want to call it. It was later on when I ended up talking to her when she was telling me about how he had been beating her, you know, hitting her for years. She showed me the pictures of past beating.

36:31I couldn't believe it. And I explained to her the things about domestic violence, jealousy, aggressive, you know, anger, just the different profiles. And she just kept telling me, well, OJ is every one of those. I went, whoa, really? Ron says Nicole asked him to speak to her husband OJ about domestic violence. And I did the very next day and he denied all of them. He said the only thing that he felt, he said, I might be a little bit jealous. He said, but that's it. The couple divorced in 1992 and were living separately when early in the morning on June the 13th, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson was found brutally murdered on the steps of her home.

37:13The body of a restaurant waiter, Ron Goldman, was found close by. Ron Shipp remembers hearing the news. I guess I didn't really want to believe it. I just, I got sick to my stomach. While the investigation was underway, did you see OJ? Oh, I did see OJ. The day after the murders, I called the house. And I said, should I come over? He goes, yeah, man, come on over here. When I was driving over there, the first thing that went through my mind was, I hope he doesn't have any cuts. Why? Because from being a cop on numerous assault calls, especially stabbings, it's like eight out of ten guys seem like they always seem to cut themselves.

37:55You know, blood squirting everywhere. It's all in their hands, and the knife slips out of their hands. And when I got to O.J.'s house and I walked through the door, he was sitting on the couch, and the first thing I saw, his left finger was bandaged. I just couldn't help it. I said, O.J., what happened to your finger? He just said, I cut it on a glass in Chicago. But what happened then was even worse, you know, because then somebody else came over, asked O.J., what happened to your finger? O.J. said, oh, I was chipping golf balls out on the front lawn. And maybe a couple hours later, somebody else asked the same question.

38:33And he said, oh, I was trying to get the cell phone out of the car. I looked at him again and went, man, he just told three different stories from three different questions. You have a fresh cut on your finger after your ex-wife's been stabbed and murdered. They asked him to take a lie detector test. I said, well, did you say yes? And then he told me at the time, no, I didn't. And I said, why would you say no, O.J.? And he said, well, he kind of laughed and said, to be honest, Ship, I've had dreams of killing her. and a lot of times when people get ready to take a lie detector test and they're guilty, I'm not saying all the times, but they will tell you an excuse as to why they don't pass it.

39:16So when he said that he had dreams of killing her, I wanted to get the heck out of there and as I left, I called my wife, told her that I believed OJ had killed Nicole and I cried all the way home. Although Ron suspected that OJ Simpson may be responsible for the double murder, when the case came to trial, he didn't really want to testify against his friend. I was just so torn, I've got to be honest, I didn't know what was up and what was down anymore. I really didn't. It was almost like having the worst dream you could ever think of. Ron was persuaded to testify when he found himself alone in the office of the district attorney.

39:53In front of him was a book of photographs and detailed shots of the murder scene. I opened the first page and there was a bunch of nice pictures of Nicole in there. Turned another page and bam, there was the homicide scene pictures. And I just almost just passed out. You know, I can't even describe the feeling, you know, because it's one thing to see. You know, I've been on a lot of homicides throughout my career at LAPD. You know, of course, you feel bad for the families, but you don't know them. But for me to look at these pictures of Nicole, who I knew very well, I hugged her and laughed with her, and to look and see that here's her head almost severed.

40:35Even today, I can't even describe what that was like. Poor Ron, he had all these stab wounds in his hands, trying to fight him off. Absolutely horrific. I said, I'll do it. I said, I will testify. O.J. Simpson always denied the murders. He assembled an experienced and expensive group of lawyers to defend him against the charges. They became known as the Dream Team, and one of their key arguments was that the Los Angeles Police Department was institutionally racist, and they claimed that incriminating evidence was planted to frame O.J. Simpson. This statement about whether somebody sounds black or white is racist, and I resent it, and that's why I said an objective.

41:17of everyone in this case is that no one planted any evidence at any time. You are both a cop and an African-American man. And so you're in this situation in this courtroom. What was it like to walk into that? It was really weird because once I walked through that door, my legs started shaking. People were dropping like flies as far as my friends. I felt like I couldn't really trust anybody. But I knew one thing I knew I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to lie. You do realise, Mr Shipp, that by testifying as you have, you are going to enhance the name of Ron Shipp. That's not why I'm doing this, Mr Douglas.

41:56I'm doing this for my conscience and my peace of mind. I will not have the blood of Nicole on Ron Shipp. I can sleep at night, unlike a lot of others. On October 3rd, 1995, after just two hours of deliberation, the jury reached its verdict. Leave the jury in the above entitled action. Find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder. Ron Shipp watched the verdict in the prosecutor's office. When they said not guilty, I just couldn't believe it. I could not believe it. And then I just started thinking about, OK, what is our life going to be like now? Because I was the only person that testified against him.

42:35I was called, you know, you sell out. You know, I was called so many names. It broke my heart. Ron Shipp was speaking to Rebecca Kesby in 2017. The O.J. Simpson case was one of the most dramatic in American history. No one else has ever been accused of the murders. O.J. Simpson was later found liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in a civil trial brought by their families and ordered to pay them US$33.5 million in damages. Simpson died last year. Right, let's take a break from murder and mayhem as we turn to this week's sporting witness. In October 1972, the first ever e-sports tournament took place.

43:19Bruce Baumgart was a 26-year-old student at the time, and he won the final event. Bruce has told his story to Guy Kilty. I was just really excited to have actually won because the best player in the lab had gone to a folk dance that night, and the second and third bass I had wiped out. So it was really an equal layer of competition and I got my picture in the Rolling Stone at 26. And it's followed me the rest of my life. Just in case you don't know, esports is where people watch other people play video games. It's now a multi-billion dollar industry with thousands of people turning up to watch tournaments all around the world.

44:00But competitive video gaming was in its infancy in the early 1970s. At Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Bruce was conducting research during the day, but by night he was playing a video game, Space War, and building a reputation as one of the best players in the country. Space War is one of the first computer games ever developed. It was written by a team of programmers in the early 60s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the PDP-1 computer, an early mini-computer that used a screen and keyboard. And it was a tournament using that video game, held in October 1972, that's now recognised as the first ever eSports event.

44:41Bruce won the final showdown of the night against four other players. Space War was groundbreaking for its time, but how does it work, Bruce? Okay, you're looking at a two-dimensional map, you're looking down on the solar system, the sun is in the middle. and you have, in the background is a field of stars, you have two ships, and gravity sucks the ships into the star unless you get up to orbital speed. There's only four buttons. Accelerate the rocket, turn left, turn right, fire a torpedo. The object of the game is to shoot as many ships as you can and survive. Okay, have you got all that? The best thing about Space War was that players could play against each other at the same time, the whole thing could be shown on a big screen, and watched by an audience.

45:27It's human against human. It's not really a computer game, so it makes it much more intelligent and lively than other games that were like puzzles. Bruce and his friends had been playing Space War for a few years already by the time 1972 came around. They were just happy playing against each other at night when the computers weren't in use for research. It was only when a journalist at Rolling Stone turned up that the first eSports tournament started to take shape. Stuart Brand was just part of the 1960s scene. He was an enthusiast for psychedelic drugs, but also for technology and do-it-yourself technology.

46:07He then convinced the editors of the Rolling Stone that he wanted to investigate the opportunity to bring computer technology to the people. As part of his investigation, Stuart Brand visited several U.S. universities and their technology labs. But it was the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the game the people there were playing he found most interesting. He visited and so he ran into it and another exciting person in charge of the lab, Lester Ernest, said, sure, come, you can look at the lab and we'll throw a party. And that's what ended up being the first recognised esports tournament, given the grand title of the Intergalactic Space War Olympics.

46:49When Stuart Brand turned up to cover the event in October 1972, he didn't come alone. The photographer that day was Annie Leibovitz. She was a nobody then, but she was working for the Rolling Stone and it was quite amazing. Click, click, click, click, going through film. She would go on to become one of the most celebrated portrait photographers in America. But back then, Bruce showed her something that blew her mind. I took her picture that night as well using a digital camera. And Annie just did not believe that you could have pictures without film. The Intergalactic Space War Olympics didn't take place in a stuffy basement on the university campus or one of the indoor arenas that esports events are held in today.

47:31We were out in the countryside for the actual space war. And it was just ordinary office acoustic tiles on the ceiling. We only had six of the wonderful display units. You sat at this thing. It was as large as a desk. The screen was 18 inches by 18 inches square, and it had one color, green. The building was divided up into little cubby holes and occasional room of blackboards and tables for seminars or recreation. It's astonishing to think that we did not have personal computers, we did not have telephones. Oh, the rooms were named after Tolkien. So the computer room was Mordor, the break room was the Prancing Pony, and so on.

48:13and the rooms were labelled an elves-ish, so it was definitely a counterculture site. Playing at 8pm was a novelty, and there was another big change from their usual gaming sessions. At the Intergalactic Space War Olympics, for the first time, five players could play against each other rather than the usual two. Compared to the tens of thousands of people who can show up at an arena for an esports tournament today, the crowd back then was fairly modest. The 30 or so people there were packed into a single room, but at least they'd brought snacks. The beer and pretzels wasn't the point. It was the playing the games.

48:49And so I probably didn't even have a beer or a pretzel. But the gallery, of course, I think went through the beer. I was intending to get back to work after the games and do some more programming. So I was probably on caffeine, coffee. Drinking beer and playing games doesn't go together. In the final set of games, known as the free-for-all, Bruce and four other players played several rounds before he came out on top.

49:18The spaceships, of course, are in the same pattern, the start pattern each time, and you hold a particular control box. I was on the lower left, and my greatest challenger was the top ship. The free-for-all is essentially two duels. so you sort of know who the strongest player against you is and so you try to stay alive you avoid the dummies and the mines and you're aiming for your challenger and it goes quite rapidly for the free-for-all because you either have an accident you fall into the sun or hit a mine or the three lesser players don't annihilate each other they're shooting at you but if you survive the opening, then it's a duel.

50:01His biggest rival on the night was Ralph Gorin, a legend in the space war community. He was as good and he wrote the game. He was the programmer who wrote the damn thing. Bruce and Ralph were the two best players on the night and the contest was tight. But Bruce thinks he had one big advantage that gave him the edge. I'd been practicing with controller in each hand, controller backwards. So it was the do not even have to think about the buttons. It was total brain reflex. And I would play two ships against whoever shows up using either my left or the right hand. So I guess I had the hand-eye coordination written into the brain.

50:38You practice until you don't even have to think about your fingers. After Bruce clinched victory, the partying continued. Stuart Brand and Annie Leibovitz went around interviewing everybody and taking other pictures. and we talked about how computers were going to take over in the future and they just didn't believe it. Looking back, Bruce finds it hard to believe people are still talking about his win more than 50 years later. Yeah, well, that's a curiosity, but it's a turning point of computer history where everything was together in a very small room before it blew up and metastasized across the whole civilization.

51:20And despite his status as the first ever esports tournament winner, He doesn't rank it among his biggest achievements. Winning a one-off game when the game has just been invented is not such a big deal. Except for the damn Rolling Stone and the famous photographer. Nowadays, you can win hundreds of thousands of dollars for winning a big esports tournament. But things were a bit different for Bruce. I won my picture in the Rolling Stone and a lifetime subscription. Bruce Baumgart was speaking to Guy Kielty. E-sports depend, of course, on computers. And it's 40 years this week since the release of Microsoft Excel, the computer spreadsheet software that's now used all over the world to make life and work easier.

52:05Here's Jill Kersley. Now, Microsoft Excel is a fairly boring spreadsheet programme. It has a reputation for being a bit boring, like a giant difficult-to-use calculator. later. But I'm hoping to change that perception because this story of a spreadsheet includes space tourists, knitting and crazy competitions. How much of you would consider yourself a spreadsheet ninja? Where Excel isn't just data crunching software, it's a religion. Would you accept 75 million dollars if it means you can't use Excel for three days? Absolutely not. I live, breathe and eat Excel. That's from Australian News and Current Affairs Programme, The Project, on Network 10.

52:53Excel is an electronic spreadsheet document in which information is in cells arranged in rows and columns. It can be used to do financial calculations and plans. It is now estimated to be used by 1.1 billion people worldwide, according to Microsoft statistics. and that means one in every eight people on the planet have used it. They probably work that out on a spreadsheet. I would take a Macintosh home at night just to play with Excel, which is kind of, seems weird. That's self-confessed computer geek Mike Koss, a software developer who worked on the programme. Mike's interest in all things mathematical started as a child.

53:38He graduated with a degree in computer science in 1983 and got a job working at a small company in Seattle called Microsoft. Mike was to start working on what was to become Excel, but it wasn't the first spreadsheet programme. That was VisiCalc, short for Visible Calculator, and was invented by Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin. After VisiCalc, their next big spreadsheet software was Lotus123 Mike and his team set about making a rival It was a covert operation Other employees were not allowed to know what we were working on So we had to cover our windows, lock our doors My wife signed an NDA so she was able to go in We worked a lot of hours but she could come in and she would do some knitting and crochet in my office while I was working on stuff late at night We were very focused on that kind of usability aspect, but the spreadsheet proper was like very traditional to the way that people were using other spreadsheets.

54:47On the development team were people who would now be considered the A-listers of the tech world. You know, our whole company was a company of geeks. I would say almost everybody was under 25 at the time. We had a few people I would call adult supervision. So we had a few managers who kind of reigned in all these young people who were super excited to be working on what we were building. Charles Simone was the head of that group, went on to become a space tourist, traveling to space twice. Gabe Newell was one of our first testers. Gabe went on to start one of the biggest video game distributors in the world now.

55:31He was just a young kid out of college. He was tasked with testing all of our code. We'd build code for him every day and hand it off, and then he would put it through its paces and try to break it. I just remember him sleeping in his office. He was really a hard worker. And then there was the top man, entrepreneur Bill Gates. Bill had ideas about how to make the spreadsheet more efficient. We were really focused on having a very fast recalculation engine. We would update the spreadsheet whenever you made changes very quickly. The first Macintosh only had 128 kilobytes of memory, like an eighth of a megabyte of memory at all.

56:12And so we had to fit all of the features you'd see into that space. And like if you took out the first version, it would look kind of primitive, but you'd recognize it. It would be like you'd see all the main functions that you'd have in today's Excel. What is this? It's Microsoft Excel. Now hold still, I'm about to perform a miracle. You're crazy, there's no time. This 1990s TV advert shows two office workers in business suits getting into a lift, worried about getting into trouble with their boss, and producing a spreadsheet in the time it takes for the lift to reach their floor. Picks up on trends, totals, quarters, dates, and does the projections for me.

56:51My spreadsheet doesn't do that. Very cool. And that product needed a very cool name to match. The programmers were not the most enthusiastic about the name Excel. I think we liked it. You know, in hindsight, I think it's just a great name. And the marketing team, you know, presented, I think, several options to us. We had a meeting, I remember, throwing out like our own names that we wanted. So had you left it to the developers, you would have either gotten one of two names. We were going to call it Number Buddy or Mr. Spreadsheet. We were marketing geniuses at the time, obviously. We went with Excel, thankfully.

57:35We were very aggressively going up against Lotus and competing for that market. I remember walking into a discount software store and I found in a bargain basement bin a copy of Lotus 123, new in the box, and it was selling for$5. And at the time, our product bundled with other applications was selling for like$395. So I say, well, yeah, this is, we have actually pretty much crushed our competitors in that case. And by 2021, there were more competitors of a different type. It's the most exhilarating sport that you've never heard of, dubbed the Super Bowl for nerds. The XL World Championships kicked off this week in Las Vegas.

58:27And three times world champion Andrew Nye posted this winning moment on his YouTube channel. This is a timed elimination. He's writing a substitute function here, some formula to get some points on the board. Andrew Nye, he's looking around, he's taking his headphones off. What is he doing? Okay, is he safe? Is he safe? This is bold, this is bold. Look at him, crossing his arms. No, no, no, the guy is flexing. He's flexing. Do you think you'll stand a good chance at winning those? No way. Yeah. I would say, but we did all kinds of fun things. You know, I think we all love the product a lot, I think, and we like to play with it and see what we can do with it.

59:11Mike has been described as the unofficial historian of the original developers as he's collected lots of memorabilia. I have things like posters. I have some of my notes and, like, internal schedules, you know, from when we were building it and lists of bugs. Do all your friends and family ask you for help with spreadsheets then? I do get that a little bit, yeah. I still love using spreadsheets. They're pretty fun. Mike Koss on the history of Microsoft Excel. He was speaking to Jill Kersley. They used to be called geeks. Now they're known as tech bros and are among the richest people in the world.

59:51That's it for this edition of the History Hour. If you've got a spreadsheet of things to do next week, I hope you will include joining us for another collection of first-hand stories from the past. For now, though, this is Max Pearson. From all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye. We did something that no one else had ever done. There was such an excitement and energy about this moment. It opened the door for everything that rapidly followed. Witness history. History as told by the people who were there. I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so. I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe.

1:00:28Witness History from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.