On a whim I looked to see where everyone was now and Jared Taylor's wiki page really stood out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Taylor

Quattro really was a great spreadsheet product at the time. As a student, it was the only affordable one as far as I can remember. On the PC, this was still a time (mid ‘80s) when most folks were using DOS and Windows 3.x wasn’t yet a common environment.

"anyone can buy paint, but does that make you a painter? No." ~ I'm stealing this....

I'd never heard of Gary Kildall so I naively searched for him on LinkedIn, couldn't find him thinking that he was the academic type that chooses not to use it. Then sadly saw that Google search showed he passed away in 1994.

That's Jared Taylor at 11:45 ???

Amazing how little has changed. Higher res screens with more colours. Where do all the other processor cycles go?

And then brand new tools like VisiData appear and everything feels like it's gone full circle.

https://www.visidata.org/

Don't underestimate just how many cycles ended up sucked into higher resolution screens with more colours. There might well be more integer calculations going on to render a single screen of text from vector fonts onto a 4K display, than from an hour of VisiCalc running away on an 8086.

Convenience and usability, mostly — for the user as well as the developer.

Both as users and developers, we’re able to do so much more with less effort on the computers of today. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to try to get a little work done on an old 286 sometime.

It’s all relative though. Back in the early/mid ‘80s, the ability to produce a single computer-generated chart out of a table of numbers was mind-blowing! Being able to print it on your new sleek dot-matrix printer was the icing on the cake! I.e. expectations were very different back in the land of the 286.

Massively larger spreadsheets, higher-precision values, but for the most part, I'd bet it's not cycles that are so interesting--modern Excel is probably surprisingly happy at 12 MHz 99% of the time. Memory and binary size is where the real bloat is.