Co-creator of VisiCalc and co-founder of Software Arts, Frankston received numerous honors and awards for his work. He has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1994) "for the invention of VisiCalc, a new metaphor for data manipulation that galvanized the personal computing industry." Frankston also received the MIT William L. Stewart Award for co-founding the M.I.T. Student Information Processing Board.
Additional recognition included the Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award (1985), the MIT LCS Industrial Achievement Award, and the Washington Award (2001) from the Western Society of Engineers, which he received jointly with Bricklin. He has also been named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.
