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

It's interesting looking at the features and marketing behind Apple's new Numbers Spreadsheet (just added in iWork 08). So familiar to me as I and the rest of Data Tailor (Bob Murphy, Ken Clark) in 1987 released Trapeze, a spreadsheet program for the Mac with a lot of the same features (and some different).

Like Numbers, Trapeze featured smart tables (which we called blocks), charts (2D and 3D), graphics and text, all freely movable around a canvas (which we called a sheet). Blocks were related by name (either the whole block, or tables where each column had a subname). Smart resizing occurred when you change related block sizes (i.e. add rows to a block and all dependent blocks resized and shifted location if necessary).

The big difference visually of course is a 20 year newer UI, I had to build mine in the old Quickdraw, supporting only 8 colors, and running on a 8mhz 68000. Still it worked well enough that 13,000 people bought a copy before the second owner (we sold the company to someone else) eventually phased it out in 1990. I still get emails from people who miss it, a testament to its power way before the hardware really caught up. One user kept old Macs around for 10 years just to run Trapeze, which was the basis of his business modeling practice.

So it's with gentle humor that I read the Apple marketing stuff and remembering how we said much of the same things with one glaring problem: in those days we couldn't import Excel files and have it fit into our block model, and thus many people couldn't get over that hurdle. Those who saw the power of Trapeze to build large interactive models and present them in one document were able to do amazing things not possible in any other spreadsheet. But Excel killed every spreadsheet program, not just ours. Such is life.

Our solution would have been to build a spreadsheet block, exactly like what Apple has done, except we were never able to invest the time, and eventually we worked on Deltagraph which made the publisher way more money. Trapeze faded into obscurity. Until today, sort of.

So congrats to Apple for reinventing the concept in a new modern package. Better 20 years late then never!

My Tags:

  • 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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My Own Successful Startup Story ... In 1984
Mar 28, 2007 09:23 perm link Readers: 5302

After reading Paul Grahams latest post Why to Not Not Start a Startup, I thought about my own software startup and figured it might be interesting to write it up. Doing a software startup today is a completely different animal than it was for me, but the desire hasn't changed much.

At my first job at General Dynamics I was the "boy wonder", the young guy who understood "PCs" when it was a mystery to everyone else. I had one of the first production IBM PC/XTs (whopping 10MB hard drive), a Lisa, and got to test some oddball new OS called Unix. One time I had two GD VPs buying me pizza at 4AM while I coded something for the IBM President. But in 1984 when the Mac was first released I got the itch to do something on my own.

Late in the year I quit and started working on spreadsheet templates for the oil and gas industry, working in the shared office of a friend of mine and some other folks. This proved to be not a great business (most of the folks in that industry didn't have PCs) but one day I had a great idea on how to build a spreadsheet program that was easier to work with and could keep you from making formula errors.

Now in 1985 starting a software business was much more of a pain that it is today. No web, no email, you could only buy software in stores or by phone, the only marketing messages you had to work with were ads in computer magazines, trade shows and user groups. Everything cost money, so raising capital meant working friends and associates for money. Eventually I raised enough money by selling stock and I got a couple friends (Bob Murphy and Ken Clark) to start coding the new application. Most of the money people were friends and business associates of my office mates and one of them acted as the CEO.

One of the coolest things I got to do during development was to go to Apple's first full developer's conference in 1986. Every one in the entire Mac world was there, Apple rented a boat for us to tool around San Francisco bay in, and we all joked that IBM (the evil empire at the time) could kill the whole Mac market with one torpedo. It was fun to be one of the group.

After working on it for 10 months we all went to the Boston Macworld show in August 1986 to check out the competition. In those days if you wanted to see other applications (and didn't want to buy copies) the only way to really see what other apps looked like was to go see them at shows. Demos cost money since you had to send them out on floppies (seems like the stone age now). I discovered my UI for the program (now christened "Trapeze") just plain sucked. So I started working 100 hours weeks for the next 4 months to totally rewrite the UI in time to ship it at the 1987 Macworld show in San Francisco. I lived on Jolt cola the whole time.

Trapeze was basically an object-oriented spreadsheet, where formula relationships were only by name and not by position. Instead of the fixed row and column grid it had free-floating blocks of data with real names. Thus a formula for a block named "profit" would be "sales-expenses" and the program dealt with the dimensions. Everything could be styled, formulas could generate charts, and blocks of text and imported graphics along with the data blocks could all be moved around freely.

The interface I came up included a feature that as far as I know, was first seen in Trapeze out side of some early Unix uses. The popup (now called dropdown usually) and the hierarchical menu seem so normal today, but there was no support in the MacOS yet so I had to roll my own.

In those days in order to sell software you had to deal with distributors and mail order firms in order to sell anything. Ads in magazines, show booths and press favors all cost tons of money. Our first orders were big and things seemed to be going well. Then our first review showed up in MacUser.

Kaboom, our bubble burst and the slide began.

The review was written by a guy how had had a bad day when he wrote that review. Later on we actually had lunch with him (long after the end of this story) and he admitted being angry at something that day and took it out on us. Unlike today reviews were the major way anyone heard an opinion, there wasn't any easy way for actual users to comment on products. So this one review (all the others were positive) put a dagger in our sales.

Our biggest selling issue was that you couldn't import Excel or Lotus 123 data, since it made no sense to convert. Many of our users were passionate about the advantages of our approach (one guy even built up a solid practice analyzing businesses, inputing the data into a worksheet which then constructed an entire business model and glossy report, which he printed on a laser) but we couldn't get enough of them.

In May 1987 I was asked to appear on a nationally syndicated computer show (Computer Chronicles) and got to demo Trapeze alongside Excel with its product manager from Microsoft. I was able to scoop them a bit by getting an unreleased (at the time) color monitor and Mac from Apple, and coding up Trapeze to support color (8!). You can watch the show (and see me in my finest white pimp suit).

By the end of the summer it was obvious we couldn't sustain the business and it was shut down (in rather ugly but private fashion) and Trapeze was sold to another company (Access Technologies, which later split up and part became Deltapoint). Trapeze did ultimately sell about 13,000 copies.

I gathered the engineers and support folks together and we started a Mac consulting business, which went on to work on portions of Persuasion (for a guy named Peter Polash who sold it to Aldus and made a fortune) and Deltagraph (still kicking today).

Eventually we all went our separate ways, Bob is currently at PalmSource and Ken works for the show lighting company Vari-lite. I am still full of ideas, and as you can see above am looking for more consulting gigs (hint hint) and writing this blog.

So why do I consider it a success, even though it failed? It was worth the risk, the effort, and a lot of fun (mostly). Today I still get emails from Trapeze users who miss the application (even I miss it). I learned a ton about programming. I still have lots of ideas I couldn't never have imagined had I stayed at General Dynamics (now Lockheed locally) and just been a drone.

So like Paul said in his essay, do a startup. No matter the result or the difficulty it's worth doing. I was 27 when I started but age, especially today, doesn't matter. With web you can start with almost nothing and still make a difference.

And maybe people will be sending you emails (or brain-to-brain messages or whatever is popular then) 20 years from now about how much they loved what you did.

My Tags:

  • Daniel Howard: Mar 28, 2007 14:01

    A useful story. Thanks for telling it.

  • dk: Mar 29, 2007 12:42

    Your one big mistake was:

    Our biggest selling issue was that you couldn't import Excel or Lotus 123 data, since it made no sense to convert.

    Even if your product is cheaper and better than your competitors it will not be cheap are effective for the users if they cannot convert their existing spread sheets... One of the big reason why Excel won this market is it converted the Lotus 123 data.

    I loved your post. Please keep writing more about experiences.

    dk

  • some guy: Mar 29, 2007 13:42

    "some oddball new OS called Unix."....unix had been around since the 70s (and in development since the 60s, hardly new....)

    and what about BBS distribution? there was no "internet" but certainly online distribution via BBSes.

  • codist: Mar 29, 2007 15:19

    That was my employer's description of it at the time.

  • Mike Coon: Mar 29, 2007 16:40

    In 1984 Unix was still pretty new to most of the non-academic world. I was still having to explain hierarchical file systems as late as 1990 when I was teaching Unix System Admin in the Air Force - Mainframes use the 'big bag O files' system.

    Great Post btw.

  • BMintern: Mar 29, 2007 17:17

    Great post, thanks for sharing. It's sad that better software doesn't always (or even often) win out, but I'm glad to hear that you are still satisfied with your experience.

  • countavdhesh: Mar 29, 2007 22:24

    Great Blog..keep sharing your experence.

    avdhesh

  • vivian : Apr 09, 2007 23:35

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    It works by adding our chat button html to your site. Your visitors click on your chat button. You answer the chats by logging into our operator client. You can have multiple chats with different visitors at the same time -- each chat is a private chat between you and each visitor.

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  • Jan: Jun 28, 2007 06:24

    I just want to say that Trapeze was an amazing spreadsheet program.

    The group I worked in as a physicist all used it on the mac and then continued

    to use it on the quadras and early powermacs. Eventually it could not run on the

    newer operating systems and so we had to stop using it.

    We all loved how easy it was to use and to display the work. I really liked the posterlike presentation style and how you could just

    tack on extra graphs tables and work area.

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