Origins
The original Borland Quattro electronic spreadsheet was a DOS program written in assembly language and Turbo C principally by Adam Bosworth, Lajos Frank, and Chuck Batterman. It was praised mainly for superior graphics on DOS. Borland acquired a replacement product called "Surpass", written in Modula-2. The main designers and programmers of Surpass were also hired by Borland to turn Surpass into Quattro Pro: Bob Warfield, Dave Anderson, Weikuo Liaw, Bob Richardson and Tod Landis. They joined other Borland programmers including Chuck Batterman, Lajos Frank, Tanj Bennett, Rich Reppert and Roger Schlafly. Bob Warfield later became Vice President of R&D at Borland. All eventually left Borland.
Quattro Pro shipped in the final quarter of 1989. The Borland main office was near the epicenter of the Loma Prieta earthquake and the building was severely damaged when the sprinkler system was triggered. The building was closed for months. All the computers were removed, placed on the tennis courts, washed down (acoustic ceilings rained gray mush onto everything when the sprinklers ran) and dried with hair dryers. Those that booted up were put to work. Quattro Pro finished final quality assurance testing and was sent to manufacturing from those computers running on the tennis courts in the (fortunately) sunny and dry autumn weather.
Read more about this topic: Quattro Pro
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)