Quattro Pro
Even with the maximum row advantage, Quattro Pro has been a distant second to Excel, in terms of sales numbers, since approximately 1996 to the present.
[citation needed] When version 1.0 was in development, it was codenamed "Buddha" since it was meant to "assume the Lotus position", #1 in the market.
[citation needed] When the product was launched in 1988, its original name, suggested to Mr. Kahn by Senior VP, Spencer Leyton at a Vietnamese restaurant in Santa Cruz, was Quattro (the Italian word for "four", a play on being one step ahead of "1-2-3").
[3] The original Borland Quattro electronic spreadsheet was a DOS program, the initial development of which was done by three Eastern Europeans, one of whom, the Hungarian Lajos Frank, was later hired by Microsoft.
Quattro was written in assembly language and Turbo C, principally by Adam Bosworth, Lajos Frank, and Chuck Batterman.
They joined other Borland programmers including Chuck Batterman, Lajos Frank, Tanj Bennett, Rich Reppert and Roger Schlafly.
The beams were damaged to the point where they required injections of epoxy in order to make them sturdy enough to support the building again.
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.
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.
Borland supplied the 1-2-3 menus as an alternative because keystroke compatibility was needed in order to run macros in 1-2-3 worksheets.
This project ran simultaneously with the Borland language group investigating the desirability of a C++ compiler, and the company decided to make a bet on C++.
Charlie Anderson was put in charge of the project and he soon had Istvan Cseri, Weikuo Liaw, Murray Low, Steven Boye, Barry Spencer, Alan Bush, Dave Orton, Bernie Vachon, Anson Lee, Tod Landis, Gordon Ko and Chuck Batterman working on the project.
Mr. Liaw and Mr. Spencer were in charge of the spreadsheet engine (written in assembly language) while Mr. Low wrote a large chunk of the UI.
First, it was the first Windows spreadsheet with multiple pages with cells that could be linked together seamlessly, a feature from Quattro Pro which QPW extended.
It was fast, it was close in feature set to Lotus 123 and Excel, and the "right-click for properties" user design was reasonably understandable.
Work was started immediately on a new version with a brand new team of engineers led by Joe Ammirato; including Bret Gillis and Peter Weyzen.
Midway through the development of version 6 a strategic decision to work closely with the WordPerfect word processor was made.
In an odd set of events, Novell purchased both WordPerfect Corporation and the Quattro Pro code base and team of engineers from Borland.
In another lawsuit, Novell claims that Microsoft had "deliberately targeted and destroyed" its WordPerfect and QuattroPro programs to protect its Windows operating system monopoly.
[citation needed] Within three months, Novell announced they were going to sell their applications to someone (eventually that proved to be Corel).
