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Hi Folks --<br><br>
There's some interesting long ago history wrt Smalltalk and spreadsheets.
The first 100 personal computers sold by Xerox (ca. early 80s) were to
the CIA and they contained what still may be the most comprehensive
extension of the spreadsheet idea (written in Smalltalk of
course):<br><br>
From the web:<br>
<tt>A proprietary Smalltalk system called "The Analyst" built
for the intelligence community then leveraged Smalltalk to an incredible
degree to form an integrated information handling suite far beyond
Office.<br>
<a href="http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/The+Analyst">http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/The+Analyst</a><br>
<a href="http://www.mojowire.com/TravelsWithSmalltalk/DaveThomas-TravelsWithSmalltalk.htm" eudora="autourl">http://www.mojowire.com/TravelsWithSmalltalk/DaveThomas-TravelsWithSmalltalk.htm<br>
</a>"Why would Xerox develop an incredible spreadsheet that could
display images, conjugate Russian verbs and why did that happen in a
strange group called XSIS located in Los Angeles and Washington?
Apparently they had an important customer with a lot of complex
information to analyze. How did Angela Coppola know that 1000 people
would show up for OOPSLA'86 when the PC committee predicted 100-200? What
sort of technology could the National Security Administration use to
print Chinese leaflets circa 1978? The Xerox Analyst served the CIA as a
analytic tool for many years. Even 13 years later it still offers tools
more powerful than MSOffice. The Analyst is still alive and well and
forms a key component in TI ControlWorks Wafer Fab Automation
System."<br><br>
</tt>Cheers,<br><br>
Alan<br><br>
At 11:06 AM 4/5/2006, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">John M McIntosh wrote on Mon, 3
Apr 2006 16:49:40 -0700<br>
> Well Sophie is an electronic book authoring/reader system, it's
to <br>
> replace Powerpoint, Word and most of MS office.<br>
> (Sorry no spreadsheets, but if someone wants to add that?).<br>
> <br>
> Since it's built on top of Tweak & Squeak and completely
open-source <br>
> you can choose to add features as you wish.<br><br>
While Excel has been fabulously successful, that is not the way I
would<br>
go for a Tweak/Squeak/Sophie spreadsheet. Instead my first priority<br>
would be to have the best table layout possible since more people
seem<br>
to use Excel for that than for actual calculations (not counting
simple<br>
sorting of tables). And having several smaller tables floating around
in<br>
a larger document seems nicer to me than a single huge 2D (almost
3D<br>
with tabbed "pages") array, though I can understand how such
a<br>
structured space can make some people feel more secure (probably
more<br>
veteran users than newbies).<br><br>
For the second step it would be interesting to look at The Analyst
for<br>
inspiration and allow arbitrary Smalltalk objects and expressions<br>
instead of just numbers and strings.<br><br>
Third: I would separate the expressions from the actual cells in
the<br>
style of Lotus Improv. This would encourage the users to think in
terms<br>
of collections of data like in APL or FScript instead of individual<br>
numbers. It would also make doing things across more than one table
less<br>
awkward. The user interface could still present things in terms of
per<br>
cell equations when that is more convenient.<br><br>
Lastly, having such a component I would use it in Sophie for things
like<br>
timelines instead of hand coding stuff in Tweak.<br><br>
-- Jecel</blockquote></body>
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