G was no wav of lknoing that, less than a I - x4 ,-r Iot4$)evepmeut Corporation "y prig engieer on the Iiipi ~vho desilmd hprov's hYptcrtcx urle, therevas .. neinrano n spreadshe Iy ll Ul WJ u UlulaoU&It,cv¢wt u yd aldtdi i businesses wouldbe buying NeXT fter all, they had never heard about Fluf Bunmv. B Y S I M S O N L. A R F I N K E L bex generation a multidimensional data 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 database engine under DOS and setts, and set up the Advanced more a slide show than a computer the Macintosh operating system, Technology 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 interest- 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 numbers 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 spreadsheet, 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 spreadsheets and discovered that for a "high-end financial modeling user could instantly call up dif- most of them employed a few basic 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 next- 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.