On 10/29/24 7:43 AM, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

On Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:24:46 -0400, DFS wrote:

"‘I grew up with it’: readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel >>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_history

I sure as hell didn't grow up with it...

I remember Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc. Then the Microsoft copycats came along.

First spreadsheet I can recall seeing was on an Apple ][ at work. A few
years later, I got a ][ myself and even used it for a work project at my
next job.

As they started to buy IT, it started with 1-2-3 on the DOS boxes, but
Mac was Word & Excel, so we started to get Excel on the DOS side too.

We also had a healthy chunk of software from PFS ... "First Choice" for Doc/Spreadsheet and "Harvard Graphics" in lieu of Powerpoint.

But as the platform wars started, each MS-DOS update conveniently tended
to break Lotus but not Excel, so that prompted us to drop Excel.

Later, as IT Departments grew in size & influence, the DIY era ended and internal corporate standardization pushed everyone onto MS-Office.

Ironic in this thread's context is that this desktop standardization
mandate also removed allowing compilers in the Engineering offices:
customized & project-specific analysis tools had originally been written
on mainframes, but with the rise of desktops had migrated to the desktop
but now could no longer be employed.

But because Excel was an "IT Dept approved" desktop application and free
under site license (Mathmatica wasn't free & wasn't available quickly),
Excel was often used to fill this need for computational analysis, which
is why one could see monstrosities of spreadsheets doing weird stuff.


-hh

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On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 08:13:21 -0400, -hh wrote:

(Mathmatica wasn't free & wasn't available quickly) ...

Macsyma was there before Mathematica, but it only ran on “real” OSes (i.e. Unix) and was written in a “real” programming language (Lisp), so it would never work on Windows.

Mathematica’s main appeal was pretty 3D graphics. They looked pretty
advanced back in the late 1980s. But you look at the package now, and they haven’t improved any.

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On 10/30/2024 9:52 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 08:13:21 -0400, -hh wrote:

(Mathmatica wasn't free & wasn't available quickly) ...

Macsyma was there before Mathematica, but it only ran on “real” OSes (i.e.
Unix) and was written in a “real” programming language (Lisp), so it would
never work on Windows.

Macsyma: originally developed from 1968 to 1982 (long before Windows was
even available)

Later:
"The price for the Macsyma 2.4 CD with license keys for the Windows
version of Macsyma, Numkit and PDEase is $500. Macsyma works with
Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP. There are unresolved issues with Macsyma
running on versions of Windows beyond XP that preclude it's use with
these operating system at this time."

And Lisp programs have run on Windows for nearly 28 years (LispWorks 4.0
by Harlequin, Mar 1997).


cola ignoramuses and liars often make up shit about so-and-so technology
not available for Windows, but you bozos are almost always wrong.

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On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 01:02:17 -0400, DFS wrote:

"The price for the Macsyma 2.4 CD with license keys for the Windows
version of Macsyma, Numkit and PDEase is $500. Macsyma works with
Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP. There are unresolved issues with Macsyma running on versions of Windows beyond XP that preclude it's use with
these operating system at this time."

Yeah, funny that.

Meanwhile: <https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=macsyma&searchon=all&suite=stable&section=all>

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On 10/31/2024 1:30 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 01:02:17 -0400, DFS wrote:

"The price for the Macsyma 2.4 CD with license keys for the Windows
version of Macsyma, Numkit and PDEase is $500. Macsyma works with
Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP. There are unresolved issues with Macsyma
running on versions of Windows beyond XP that preclude it's use with
these operating system at this time."

Yeah, funny that.

Meanwhile: <https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=macsyma&searchon=all&suite=stable&section=all>

Meanwhile:
https://maxima.sourceforge.io/windows-install.html https://wolfgang.dautermann.at/maxima/nightlybuild/

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Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote at 18:31 this Tuesday (GMT):

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

On Tue, 29 Oct 2024 07:24:23 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

There was almost no difference between using Excel vs Calc even back
then. But why anyone would use a spreadsheet for a job better suited to
a database is still a mystery to me.

My experience with Excel users is 'if you have a hammer everything looks
like a nail'. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a spreadsheet used as
intended.

Check out ControlCalc. Our company hired a guy to build an air-traffic lighting system. He build the control hardware himself, and he used ControlCalc
to drive it (and show graphics of various airfields).

Each page/sheet in the spreadsheet was a single thread of execution.
Loads of fun to figure out if you were new to that project.

We (not me personally) rewrote it using C++ and Qt eventually.

That sounds miserable geez. It's cool that it's possible, but it
probably shouldn't be in production.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

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On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:40:44 -0400, DFS wrote:

Meanwhile: https://maxima.sourceforge.io/windows-install.html https://wolfgang.dautermann.at/maxima/nightlybuild/

Interesting that the last “stable” build is over a year old.

Without someone to do the Dimdows build for you, you wouldn’t have a clue what to do, would you?

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