| > I think Lotus 123 was the pinnacle of golden era of keyboard-driven spreadsheets, but it was only an incremental improvement over VisiCalc. They sat on their laurels with 123 v2 for much too long, and competitors surpassed them. v3 wasn't enough more to catch up. Enable OA's spreadsheet module[1] was certainly head and shoulders above 123, offering real 3D capability (where what Excel views as multiple independent sheets could be addressed directly, so you could do things like have a layer for each month of an annual report, with the topmost being as @SUM() over the column of montly numbers below it), much richer set of functions, and integration with a database and word processor. And there were others, too. I liked Lucid-3D, which wasn't really 3D but kinda fractal, where you could set up any given cell to drill into a sub-spreadsheet that was used to calculate a single value that would roll up into its parent. And Borland had a competitor, but I don't recall anything about that one. [1] During college I had a part-time job working on this, on the testing team. One cool thing we testers did to keep ourselves entertained was to build a spreadsheet casino. Each of us took on a given casino game to implement via spreadsheet macros. My game was blackjack, and it supported the full range of features: multiple decks, double-down, insurance, and all that. Another guy did craps, the result of which was that we found a subtle bug in the app's random number generator. He set it up to play itself automatically and left it running overnight. When we came back in the next day, he was rich; that's not supposed to happen. He ran the test again the next night, and same thing. The bias in the RNG was causing rolls of 11 to happen more often than they should have. |
Pyspread has some interesting features along those lines.