Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!cca!cfh From: cfh@cca.UUCP (Christopher Herot) Newsgroups: net.usoft Subject: Re: Spreadsheet Summary Message-ID: <4846@cca.UUCP> Date: Thu, 9-Jun-83 10:18:17 EDT Article-I.D.: cca.4846 Posted: Thu Jun 9 10:18:17 1983 Date-Received: Fri, 10-Jun-83 01:13:49 EDT References: utcsstat.652 Lines: 19 The summary doesn't mention one important difference among the spreadsheets: the style of terminal interface. The spreadsheets we have grown to love on microcomputers usually have a screen editor approach where one moves a cursor on the screen with single button pushes, entering and changing values at the cursor location. On Unix, this requires use of raw mode and (if at all general) termcap. Some of the unix spreadsheet programs do this. Others (such as vc) use a simpler (and ugly) approach where one enters new values by typing strings such as "r6c2: 20" to put the value 20 in row 6, column 2. If spreadsheet programs had started this way they never would have caught on. For a while Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto was offering Multiplan. According to their president, they withdrew it from the market due to a lack of cooperation and support from Microsoft. (They couldn't get the source code, among other things.) If someone knows of a Unix spreadsheet that ran under 4.2BSD and used raw mode and termcap, please let me know.