Any minute now Dan Bricklin (pictured), the guy who co-invented VisiCalc back in the olden days - and so precipitated the computer revolution - is going to deliver the first release of wikiCalc, a GPL 2-governed next-generation spreadsheet written in the Perl scripting language that - being a wiki - lets multiple users simultaneously log in and update the numbers over the Internet.

Actually, it's not just a newfangled browser-based spreadsheet. It's a newfangled web authoring tool for pages that include data that's more than just unformatted prose such as schedules, lists and tables and uses the spreadsheet metaphor. There's a demo of the thing at www.softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha.

Bricklin was aiming to get it out the door by the end of November and when last seen the thing had hit beta release 0.97 so it's inching to 1.0. Bricklin's been working on it since last year.

There's supposed to be optional dual-licenses for those who don't want the GPL. It is not meant for heavy-duty spreadsheet operations or serious calculations although it keeps an audit trail for Sarbanes-Oxley purposes. And unlike other webtop applications seen lately, it can run on your own server, not just on somebody else's.

SocialText will be doing the commercial distribution of wikiCalc. And Bricklin said wikiCalc (as SocialCalc) will evolve alongside SocialText's open wiki.

After the 1.0 release, SocialText, which bills itself as an enterprise wiki, will be helping Bricklin run an open source project on Sourceforge derived from wikiCalc and provide additional developers.

The beta runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix and other platforms that can run Perl.