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B Y S I M S O N L. A R F I N K E L bex generation a multidimensional structurc. till, IIaul 2 p lc Cllc ' JtlAC"% t(, The idea that eventually grew into A slick interface should sit on top, go ahead with the "Back Bay" proj- Improv started in 1986, when to make it easy to get information ect (named after a Boston neighbor- Lotus Development Corporation in and out. hood known for its townhouses, took an empty library on the first By the end of the summer, Salas boutiques, and restaurants). After floor of its building at 161 First had a demonstration program experimenting with interfaces and Street in Cambridge, Massachu- working on an IBM PC. It was really a engine under DOS and setts, and set up the Advanced more a slide show than a the operating system, Group (ATG). program, admits Salas: The math the group decided that the product ATG's charter was to come up was all faked. The project stalled at would be based on OS/2 and Micro- with new ideas that Lotus might this phase until February 1987, soft's Presentation Manager. be able to turn into products. when Salas hired Glenn Edelson, a They even picked a mascot- There were three projects and three hot programmer whose job it was Fluffy Bunny-and started up an researchers: a new development to take Salas's ideas for general for- underground newsletter, "Fluffy environment, an artificial intelli- mulas and see if they could be imple- Bunny Goes to Back Bay." gence system that never panned mented in C++. out, and "Modeler"-the seed of "I had described all those Green light Improv. [ideas] with hand waving," recalls A month later, in October, Steve Jobs One of the hardest things Salas. "I had no clue how to build came to Lotus to show off his new about using a computerized spread- it. Glenn came in and we started thought computer. After the talk, Lotus's top sheet like Lotus's 1-2-3 is laying out working." management gave Jobs a private the initial model: How to arrange Things clicked. It soon became show-and-tell of their most - the rows? The columns? It is simple obvious that the technology for cal- ve had a ing products then under develop- enough to start entering culating general formulas could ment. and formulas in cells; it is another work and that multidimensionality high-end Salas showed Jobs a clunky, thing entirely to create a structure was a powerful way to model con- character-based , but all that you can grow with. plicated financial problems. In the of the future elements were Enter Pito Salas, a bright devel- spring of 1987, Salas hired Bonnie fimancial thereFormulas were entered at the oper in the ATG. Salas studied a Sullivan to write a specification for bottom of the spreadsheet rather variety of complicated models that the project arid Jeff Anderholm to than integrated into the cells; it had been built with conventional see if there was really a market need modelilg was multidimensional; and the and discovered that for a "high-end user could instantly call up dif- most of them employed a few application." package, but ferent views of the same data set. patterns. If a spreadsheet program That summer, Modeler went Immediately, Jobs wanted Back could be taught to understand those on tour. The "road show," as Salas Bay for the NeXT. patterns, he realized, it would be called it, took the Modeler demo customers "He kept getting more excited. much easier to use. program to six of Lotus's key cus- He was the most excited person in Within a few months, Salas tomer accounts. At each stop they said, 'No. the room," remembers Salas. had come up with the fundamental spent a day with a few analysts who Back Bay fit right in with Jobs's idea at the core of Improv: that the did high-end financial modeling. vision, says Allen Olsen, ATG's raw data in a spreadsheet, the way "We had a paradigm shift on It's the - development manager. "Right from that the user views the data, and that trip," recalls Salas. "It was the start, he was looking for some- the formulas used to perform cal- really cool. We said that these ideas generation thing new. It might have been better culations can all be separated from might be turned into a high-end financially for his company to get one another. The formulas should financial modeling package of 1-2-3, but that would have compro- be general, so that the user can interest to perhaps ten percent of spreadsheet"' mised his vision. [Back Bay] was type something like, "PROFIT = your company, and they said 'No, attractive because it was a new kind PRICE - COST" and have the no, no! What you have is the next of spreadsheet." spreadsheet calculate every generation spreadsheet-something Likewise, the Back Bay group PROFIT cell from its corre- that will be used by half of our was excited by the NeXT. But when sponding PRICE and COST cells. company!' " Jobs went back to California, the The user should be able to rear- Despite the enthusiastic com- Back Bay group continued working range the views to highlight the rel- ments, Lotus still took more than a on the OS/2 product-or at least they evant information and relations. year to decide to turn Salas's ideas tried. Writing applications for the The data itself should be stored in into a product. The decision was buggy initial releases of OS/2 and

34 All I FALL 1991 Presentation Manager was no he was wooing us," says Lynda. of different ideas, the developers picnic. And the allure of Jobs's "It must have been three feet tall!" decided to put them in their own black cube kept creeping back into Perhaps more important, window. their minds. NeXT sent technical wizard Bruce "And then Steve Jobs came," The decision to switch Back Blumberg to Lotus, where he gave says Kleppner, remembering Jobs's Bay to the NeXT came four the Back Bay developers a special visit in April 1989. "He said, 'Okay, months later. Ed Belove, the vice one-week class. who's the guy who came up with president of advanced technology, Fluffy Bunny was off and the picture? It's very important that left a Post-It stuck on Salas's com- running. he be here.' " puter: "Pito-Come see me as soon Jobs then said that the cate- as you get back. This is very impor- Direct manipulation gory manipulation had to be more tant.-Ed." The best part about developing a direct. "You have to be able to "I think that [Lotus CEO] Jim user interface with Interface Builder touch the categories and move Manzi really believed in us," recalls wasn't the ability to design a single them around. Having them off in a Jobs. "When the Improv team rec- interface quickly; it was the ability to separate window is too removed," ommended to proceed on the try out a lot of them. "It let us devel- Kleppner remembers Jobs saying. NeXT (after their failure on OS/2 op a lot of bad Uls," says Salas. "We "He didn't even want to have the and Presentation Manager), Jim could have an idea, and in an hour tiles; he wanted to just move them gave the green light." we would have it on the screen." around. He's a fanatic for direct There were both marketing For example, an early version manipulation, and it really shows." and technical reasons for moving of Improv's Item Dispenser was Jobs didn't have an answer, Back Bay to the NeXT, says Frank simulated with Interface Builder says Kleppner, but "one of the King, vice president of Lotus's soft- and multiple windows. Other benefits of that [meeting] was that ware business group. By putting times, developers used the program we junked the idea of the extra Back RBav on a computer nlatform .....- .... . r. r ...... merely as an electronic blackboard panel" and put the Category Tiles that couldn't run 1-2-3, Lotus to sketch out ideas before writing on the worksheet itself. wouldn't have the problem of the code to make the ideas work. I explaining to customers which Perhaps the single most impor- Conflict resolution spreadsheet to use for which appli- tant and unique aspect of Improv's In a way, Jobs himself became an cation. There wouldn't be any mar- user interface is its Category Tiles, icon on the Improv development keting conflicts with Lotus's cash which the program uses to repre- landscape. "He would come in cow. sent different dimensions of a periodically, tell us what he liked But King also wanted his engi- multidimensional data set. But in and what he didn't like," remem- neers to experiment with the NeXT January 1989, Back Bay didn't bers Kleppner. "We didn't do development system. "I have a lot have Category Tiles. Instead, all of everything he wanted, but he of respect for Steve and the tech- the view rearrangement was done pushed us in the right direction a nology he has developed," says with menu commands with names lot of the time." King. "I wanted to see if the things like Promote, Demote, and For example, in one issue of he was saying about NeXTstep Perspective. "Fluffy Bunny Goes to Back Bay," were true." "It had all of these arbitrary Fluffy Bunny is warned: "Some- The switch also gave the Back restrictions," says Kleppner. Then times formulas are friendly, but Bay group the freedom to rethink the group hit upon the idea of using sometimes they are Not Very Nice." some of the basic ideas about the icons. "We realized that if we repre- Formula conflicts were the user interface. Rather than try to sented these things as icons, all problem. Since Improv has general port the code written for Present- these manipulations could be repre- formulas, it's possible that a single ation Manager to the NeXT, the sented by moving icons from one cell can be specified by more than group resolved to rewrite the entire place to another." one formula. A business's total user interface from scratch. "We The Category Tiles also "broke profit over two years could be cal- knew that we had a lot of work to through a lot of barriers in under- culated either by subtracting the do in the UI area, and it seemed standing for new users," says Salas. total price from the total cost or by that it was quick to do [on the They let users visualize and directly summing the profits for each year. NeXT]," recalls Olsen. manipulate the dimensions of the The Back Bay group thought A few days after the decision, multidimensional database. that the possibility of formula con- Steve Jobs sent a huge bouquet of But where should the icons for flicts was a real weakness in the flowers to Cambridge. "It was like the categories go? After trying a lot [ CONTINUED ON PAGE 79 ] the most productive development [ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35 ] had spent a fair amount of time opti- program. There seemed to be no mizing the old one," says Olsen. environment for graphical applica- way to automatically resolve them. Days before the announcement, tions, bar none." When Improv detected a conflict, it nobody knew if Improv's graphs Meanwhile, the Improv group is invalidated both formulas and would have text on them or not. willing to talk only about support "omplained to the user. Yes, some- By introduction day, they did. of the existing NeXT product. roreo on -e_gii orI cimes formulas were not very nice. During the following months, Foremost on mthe agenua IS ItctmCll is not a weak- to users' reactions. Lotus has set up "Jobs said, 'This the newly named Improv group CC'_4 ness, it is a great feature!' " remem- shipped out their beta release of the a hotline for direct user input, bers Kleppner. "With 1-2-3, you program. The final version started something that is very unusual for can copy and blow away a formula." shipping in February 1991. Lotus. The company also produces The fact that Improv could auto- Once again, Steve Jobs sent a user newsletter and is conducting matically detect conflicts and tell flowers to the developers. Only this extensive interviews to find out A dozen what niser like about the nrogram the user about them was a major time, it was truckloads. . I I I~~ step forward. large bouquets came, along with and what they want cnanged. As the product matured, many many small ones. "There was one "It's not the typical Lotus, commands held over from the OS/2 bouquet that was five feet tall-the where we sit in our ivory tower and version were eliminated. Mean- size of a short doc writer," says run ads," says Anderholm. "We while, the Help system and the Urgotis. need the feedback." Presentation Builder were developed as separate application programs (the Help system was later integrat- ed into Improv). Forty people, not the Lotus, including 13 developers, were working on the project. All of the where in our pieces were falling into place. Back in Redwood City, California, NeXT was struggling to ivory and get the NeXTstep 2.0 operating system completed. Originally, the run a( need project was called "Warp 9," ,ecause that was how fast the NeXT development team had to the 1 .k" get it out. As the summer of 1990 progressed, the Back Bay group received a variety of NeXTstep pre- releases: Warp 2, Warp 3, Warp 3i, What's next? Already, users have made it and finally Magenta. "Not only Probably the most-asked question very clear that Improv needs macros was it a new version; it had a new about Improv is whether Lotus and an Undo capability. But more numbering scheme!" exclaims plans to develop versions for other ·0, ;·_il than that, says Anderholm, "We Kleppner. platforms. . . have to figure out what we can add Other changes-as well as bugs "We are all mindful of the .1, ... I.-...is to the product to help people learn introduced in intermediate re- higher revenue opportunities in the it, because you have to unlearn leases-were far more serious. One [] Windows environ- what you know about conventional bug in the memory allocation ment," says King, hinting that the spreadsheets like Excel and 1-2-3. scheme caused the malloc() tunc- development group is already fairly "Our challenge is to convince tion-and all of Improv-to run far along the preliminary design people that the benefits of this new incredibly slowly. Another bug with stages of the project. spreadsheet are worth the cost of the Mail application prevented But designing a user interface switching."* people from sending documents. with Windows development tools Then, a few weeks before the is a problem, says King. "There is rollout of the new NeXT , no doubt in my mind that if we SIMSON L. GARFINKEL the NeXTstep text object changed had started to do Improv on is a Senior Editor at NeXTWORLD. completely-a real problem for Windows, we wouldn't be as far T..r.'c Dp.nr-i-t; R1ildCer "We LII~V JIJIILOIII Y" -l along as we are now. NeXTstep is