Tuesday, November 25, 2014

The Story of DeltaGraph

Andrew Wulf:

The key idea we came up with was figuring out how to build all the charts resolution independent. Cricket Graph and most other charting applications including Microsoft's (Excel did not have built in charts yet) used Quickdraw to output the charts, which was basically just screen resolution. People in the newspaper, magazine, scientific journals, etc, industries really needed Postscript quality charts so they could print at their normal resolution and quality. The Wall Street Journal for example used a mainframe to build their charts. They would become a key supporter.

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When I started the UI code I asked two questions of Deltapoint (1) will this code ever be ported to Windows (2) do you want to support multiple documents open at a time. The answer to both was no. Windows was still too primitive to care about and multiple open documents was fairly uncommon.

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One time General Motors had said that if we supported a certain chart type they would buy 10,000 copies. Of course we quickly added it and then they decided not to after all.

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