Apple's Numbers Spreadsheet - Like My Trapeze Spreadsheet But 20 Years Later
Aug 07, 2007 20:27 perm link Readers: 2649

• Robert MacLeay: Aug 07, 2007 23:12
  

  AND it had a better function set than Excel has even today!

  I even used it for desktop publishing before Quark came along.

  Running on System 6 it was great, but it never worked right under System 7.

• Jim Harrison: Aug 08, 2007 05:26
  

  There were a number of great ideas in competing software packages in the late '80s and early '90s, before they were killed off by MS Office. It's interesting to speculate what the world might be like if a standard data container (OpenDoc) had been successful in preventing proprietary file lock-in and allowed multiple tools to continue to compete based on UI, etc. In any case, it's great to see worthy ideas from that time reappear.

• codist: Aug 08, 2007 07:30
  

  I also contributed to Persuasion, a presentation app from Aldus/Adobe that ultimately got killed off by Office having Powerpoint in it for "free".

• Art Busbey: Aug 08, 2007 07:42
  

  Using the block design and matrix algebra I had some really elegant multivariate stat sheets running - far easier to understand and implement than in Excel. I also miss Trapeze... so elegant and obvious (IMHO).

• Stephen: Aug 08, 2007 11:17
  

  You must mean 8 bit color. My Mac II did 256 colors in 1987. Now it has 24 bit color. It also does 8 bit gray, something my PC still doesn't do.

  Does color matter much to a numeric spreadsheet? Did it create graphs? CGA would have been enough for that. Was there a DOS port?

• codist: Aug 08, 2007 12:44
  

  No the original quickdraw color model was 3 bit color, I wrote to that spec in 1986. Once color was actually shipped they added a real 8 bit color model later on in 1987. Color at the time was new. It was useful for presentation of data (like charts) which was one of Trapeze's strengths. At the time spreadsheets were used for analysis only. Still even with our color support most printers were still black and white.

  Mac version only.

• David Foster: Aug 08, 2007 20:24
  

  I am so excited. I was one of those 13,000 users of Trapeze in the 1987-1989 era and have always missed the program. I did some amazing stuff with the program handling data from plate readers while a scientist at Genentech. It took awhile to learn, but for many tasks it was much more adaptable than Excel and it excelled at generating appealing output. I discovered the old manual and a floppy the other day while rummaging around in a very old box and must admit I wished I could have pushed the disk into my MacPro (an absolute impossibility of course) and played around with it again. I am excited that perhaps I can do far better than that now. I can predict that most Excel power users will find this program perplexing and many won't get it unless they approach it from a new perspective and build anew, discarding their past worksheets. It may be too much to hope that the Excel generation will take the effort, but at least the millions now being introduced to Mac computing may have the opportunity to discover there is more than one way to skin a spreadsheet.

• codist: Aug 08, 2007 21:49
  

  I don't have a copy of Trapeze anymore. There is a macplus emulator called "vMac" (a couple of versions exist) but I don't know if it works on Tiger.

• Michael Toy: Aug 10, 2007 12:48
  

  When I heard about Numbers I said to myself "Sounds like Trapeze, finally". I'm one of the 13,000 (in fact i just looked, i still have my manual and floppies) and have missed Trapeze ever since my Macs grew up enough to no longer be able to run Trapeze.

  Trapeze was "insanely great", I salute you and your co-developers. I'll be thinking of you, and silently thanking you, every time I stretch out a block of data in Numbers.

• codist: Aug 12, 2007 16:29
  

  There were many times during the past years I wanted to write Trapeze over again. Guess I don't need to now. Of course Trapeze had more features than Numbers, but writing it just for fun now would be too much work...

• Nelson Byrne: Aug 13, 2007 14:58
  

  Michael Toy: "Trapeze was "insanely great", I salute you and your co-developers."

  I second that. It made nice graphs, too. The auto block resizing was wonderful. One could include text blocks for comments and explanation. The formulas were SOO easy to use and easy to understand and explain. I don't think Excel ever *had* a Gudermannian function, by the way.

  Blocks would reveal their names with cmd-y, very handy. Ah, we miss it today.

  And it was a database handler too.

  It was the single best app I ever owned.

  About all it lacked was cell phone capability.

  (I also used and liked Persuasion before it got eaten by someone - Aldus?)

  (and I used DeltaGraph a lot after Trapeze)

  Kudos to the developers. You must all still be very proud.

• GrahamW: Aug 13, 2007 15:19
  

  Another ex-Trapeze user. Have been lamenting lack of independent blocks ever since... funny how it's now *twenty* &^%$# years!

• Bob Murphy: Aug 13, 2007 18:33
  

  Andrew came up with the basic idea for the program, which was to have growable blocks and layout capabiities. For at least the first major version, he also did the entire user interface, and all graphics, including the charts. Ken did a lot of underlying guts, like memory management and the calculation ordering (which, if I'm not mistaken, was the first natural-order approach to spreadsheet-type calculations). And I did the formula parser and the block-based calculations.

  That's pretty funny about the Gudermannian. I threw it in as a joke - never thought anyone would actually pay attention to it. :-) Anyway, it's nice to hear people still like Trapeze!

• king: Aug 17, 2007 22:15
  

  i searched for screenshots ofthis program yet i couldnt find any,

  can u provide some?

• codist: Aug 18, 2007 09:21
  

  I haven't been able to run Trapeze in like 15 years, so the only screen shots are in the old manual I still have, which aren't very useful.

• Gary Lang: Aug 19, 2007 18:59
  

  I installed Numbers yesterday and wondered if anyone would remember Trapeze. I always thought Trapeze was a work of art, and was surprised to see these useful notions finally come out again.

  And bobert - where are you? Give me a buzz.

• Rob Beynon: Aug 29, 2007 14:17
  

  I used to use Trapeze to write highly specific and valuable laboratory tools. The control of tables, the ability to break away from rows and columns, and the functions - matrix arithmetic for example. It was so far ahead of its time that the learning curve was a bit steep, and Excel won over, against common sense and logic. But, if it ever came back again...I still have the Trapeze manual for sentimental reasons.

• Gavnodes: Sep 09, 2007 05:30
  

  I was another Trapeze fan who was sorry to see it go. I kept my manuals and floppies around in the hope it would reappear, but it never did (now I know why!).

  I'm glad Apple has taken up the baton, as it were. It's just a pity you're not getting the recognition you richly deserve for it.

  Gav

• Steve Wille: Sep 09, 2007 19:51
  

  One problem with running Trapeze in modern simulator environments is that I think it is not 32-bit clean (for those of you that remember that MacOS issue).

  To me, the similarity between Trapeze and Numbers is superficial. The real power of Trapeze was in the formula-per-block concept and the clever way in which block sized themselves based on the inputs, all of which are foreign to Numbers.

  Sitting on my to-do someday list is to write a new modern freeware or shareware Mac application that borrows these brilliant aspects of Trapeze's design. I wish the source for Trapeze had been released into the public domain when it was mothballed. It a shame that this work is just sitting there gathering dust or was destroyed.

  Another possibility might be for Apple to bolt-on these sorts of features in a future version of Numbers. This might be done with little disruption to the current functionality (basically a table could have a single formula or per-cell formulas). It would be nice to have Trapeze's power living inside the high-quality and feature-rich graphic canvas implemented in Numbers.

• codist: Sep 10, 2007 12:53
  

  I don't even have a copy of the source anymore. I do still know the core functionality so I'm sure I could rebuild it again, give suitable resources. But it's too complex to do part time.

• Vern Klukas: Mar 15, 2008 13:33
  

  I still have my Trapeze tshirt, "fly through the figures with the greatest of ease".

  And the user mentioned doing the business modelling could quite possibly be a pal of mine, though there could of course be many of those, given how excellent Trapeze was for scenario modelling.

• David Dlugos: Mar 15, 2008 15:42
  

  >One user kept old Macs around for 10 years just to run Trapeze, which was the basis of his business modeling practice.

  A friend (hi Vern) pointed me to this blog, pretty sure the above was me

  I still can run it, and until OS 7.6 quit talking to my OS X machines i was using it fairly regularily. I'd still like to get it running again... my hope is that those trying to keep Classic running in Leopard will build an emulator that will also run 7.6.1, the couple times i have attempted to make them work, i haven't been able to get them to boot.

  Trapeze -- even on my ancient 50/100 68040 machine -- still runs circles around Excel. Numbers may have a veneer of what Trapeze looked like, but when you actually try to do something not really... and if you actually try to write a program in numbers it falls on its face.

  dave

• Galen Gisler: Jun 17, 2008 01:13
  

  I too was one of those 13,000, and did lots of work with Trapeze. I remember the MacUser review that effectively sank the project, and thought at the time how wrong it was. It was a great program to use, and gave me very useful insights into the data I was examining (outputs of numerical simulations run on supercomputers) that would have taken much longer with Excel.

  I'm brand new to Numbers as of this month, and reminded, as other readers of this column have been, of how great and innovative Trapeze was.

  I still have some Trapeze files hanging around that I haven't been able to open in many years, analyses of particle acceleration studies that we did in the late 1980s. Questions arise regarding those studies that aren't answered by the reports we wrote, so it might be useful to examine them again. Is the format of Trapeze files sufficiently documented that an importer for Numbers might be written?

  Galen

• codist: Jun 18, 2008 18:01
  

  I no longer even have the source. If you still have some old install disks, I think someone wrote a mac plus emulator (Mini vMac), maybe its possible to rerun it. No clue though. All I have left is a manual and memories. The file format was binary but after 20 years I remember nothing of it.

• David Dlugos: Jun 26, 2008 10:22
  

  I have given lots of thot to a resurrenction of Trapeze. In the end the coming of the Intel Macs and no Classic will hopefully lead to better & more robust Classic emulators that will allow the running of Trapeze -- i still have very valuable work in Trapeze and would use it in an emulator over any spreadsheet out there.

  I don't think Numbers is anywhere close to powerful enuff to support a Trapeze sheet (or Excel for that matter). One of the Math processors like Octave would have a better chance. The Trapeze text format would be the only viable way of exchange -- which means you'd have to get the sheets open long enuff to export them.

  dave

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