Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze_(spreadsheet_program) in 1987 which is the spritual ancestor to a lot of alternative spreadsheets. We were killed by having to compete with Excel with something not a row and column spreadsheet (it's named block-oriented). If it hadn't died in 1989, a lot of what people are doing today would have been possible over time, but decades ago. Some of the recent attempts were aware of Trapeze, but it's been so far in the past I have no idea about these folks.

View on HN

I've long suspected that excels early dominance killed a lot of innovation. Glad it's finally happening now, but a bit sad on what could have been.

Still have the code? You should open source it! Probably nothing comes off it, but that's guaranteed to be the outcome of keeping it closed

Back then, I worked on an office suite called Enable, specifically on the spreadsheet module. I can confirm that this is what killed us.

And for the time, Enable's ss had some interesting innovation. One was the integration through the whole suite. But most interesting to me, on the ss team, was the 3D nature of the app.

Excel liked to bill itself as 3D, but it's not really: their tabs aren't a true third dimension. But Enable's was, so any range could be specified with a Z-dimension if you chose. This allowed interesting patterns like a report with an XY plane for each month, with the top one being a summary, implemented by summing (or whatever operation is appropriate) that 1x1 cell down through the Z range.

Another contemporary one I liked to play with also claimed to be 3D and wasn't but in an interesting way. Lucid 3D was actually hierarchical, such that any sheet could expose a single value to be consumed by a single cell in a parent container sheet, recursively.

At one point I found it, but since its gotten lost in various Mac transfers so I am not sure it still exists. I do remember it was uncompilable (ThinkC I believe from 1988). If I find it I will put it somewhere and mention it on my blog (https://thecodist.com). I also have the original manual, buried somewhere as well, which would be enough for someone to try recreating the engine).

Yes, every single spreadsheet was killed by Excel being in Office. There were a lot of attempts to do something new, all failed.

Wow, Trapeze is cool! Never heard of it until now. And it basically is a spiritual ancestor to what I've been working on. A "block-based" spreadsheet that also preserves row/col style referencing where needed.

And we're still competing with Excel almost 40 years later...

Thanks for sharing!

I still love this concept in Numbers.app, and usually develop new spreadsheet models there before moving it to Google Sheets to share with a wider audience, usually by replicating tons of sheets for the various data table.

So, thank you very much for your invention, and I'm glad it lives on!

I would prefer RShiny, but the intended audience can't modify that...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com