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.