Instacalc has been around since 2026. Coming up on 19 years, old enough to program itself!

I've had features languishing for at least a decade, that I've knocked out this month:

• Proper offline mode
• UI controls (sliders, etc.)
• Revision history (one of the first comments on my first demo, back in 2006!)
• Text view (like Soulver, Numi, etc.)
• And of course, building this blog
• (Work in progress: refactoring everything to modern React)

Again, it's not that I couldn't build them. I could. But I didn't, so I guess I couldn't? The friction of building throwaway prototypes was too much.

So, the experimentally-verified failure was not shipping, not shipping a buggy version that's painful to maintain. (Well, to be fair, I haven't seen the maintenance for these yet...)

Oh, as a bonus, there's an unshipped feature too: A text CLI

I'd like to package it up so you can npm i -g instacalc and have it on your machine in seconds.

This was all in October, after hibernating for years in my dream backlog.