Wall Street lore holds that “junk bond” king Michael Milken once blamed the tumultuous changes that roiled American finance in the 1980s on VisiCalc, the pioneering spreadsheet software. This article takes Milken's quip as a prompt to explore the practical and cultural place of computing in 1980s finance. It reveals that PCs, especially spreadsheets, augmented the capacities of 1980s financiers in three ways—surveillance, valuation, and imagination—each crucial to Milken's “machine.” Yet this article also exposes another side to Milken's success, grounded not in computation but charisma. Milken's power lay both in innovative command over novel technicalities and a simultaneous sense that he possessed a suprarational vision transcending the technical. Milken's spreadsheets help us to reconsider a central debate in the social studies of finance about the “ghost in the financial machine” and to examine the co-construction of “killer apps” and “killer applicants” in the early history of personal computing.

中文翻译：

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Michael Milken 的电子表格：80 年代 Go-Go 中的计算和金融魅力

华尔街的传说认为，“垃圾债券”之王迈克尔·米尔肯曾将 1980 年代扰乱美国金融业的动荡变化归咎于开创性的电子表格软件 VisiCalc。本文以米尔肯的俏皮话为契机，探讨了计算在 1980 年代金融中的实践和文化地位。它揭示了个人电脑，尤其是电子表格，在三个方面增强了 1980 年代金融家的能力——监视、估值和想象力——每一种对米尔肯的“机器”都至关重要。然而，这篇文章也揭示了米尔肯成功的另一面，其基础不是计算，而是魅力。米尔肯的力量既在于对新颖技术的创新指挥，又在于他拥有超越技术的超理性愿景。米尔肯