egv@aicchi.UUCP (Vann) (07/14/85)
We just received a shipment of what is billed as a "power" users spreadsheet for the Macintosh entitled CRUNCH. It looks a great deal like 1-2-3 with a number of intelligent enhancements. 1 - Memory management is sophisticated ala the SMART spreadsheet. (i.e. unused cells are not allocated) 2 - Built-in spreadsheet auditing 3 - Graphics are available from the same menu (and disk) as CRUNCH. But... While playing with the REPLICATE function a rather nasty "feature" was discovered. If you should exceed memory by say attempting to replicate a formula or value the length of an entire column (9K plus cells) you run out of memory at approximately 5600+ cells. The application dutifully notifies you of this fact. If you then erase the cells in that column and now try to enter data anywhere else on the spreadsheet it will not allow such a move. The reason is that the application is still certain that you are out of memory. Some flag has not been reset! Thus you are suddenly unable to do anything else and the supposedly unused cells still be considered in the memory manage- ment allocation schema. Other than this the documentation and appearance are clean. I trust that the bug will be cleaned up in the next release. Rumor has it that Paladin was bought out by Lotus. Or am I confusing them with Palantir, or simply mistaken altogether? -- Eric Geoffrey Vann Analysts International (Chicago Branch) (312) 882-4673 ..!ihnp4!aicchi!egv
dws@tolerant.UUCP (Dave W. Smith) (07/17/85)
> Rumor has it that Paladin > was bought out by Lotus. Or am I confusing them with Palantir, or simply > mistaken altogether? *** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR RUMOUR *** Paladin/VisiCorp is across the street from us. Paladin, who was developing some sort of an AI based integrated thingy, was formed by some ex Visi people. After remerging with Visicorp (after a bloodbath at Visi), the newly formed Paladin/VisiCorp decided that they really wanted to stay in software publishing. They layed off most of their technical people (some of whom were QAing CRUNCH as their final assignment). Now, cars are seldom seen in their parking lot past 6:00pm. Also, CRUNCH wasn't developed in-house. An apocryphal story about the old Visicorp told that the only manager in-house who actually *used* any of their products was Mitch Kapor. [standard disclaimer] -- David W. Smith {ucbvax}!tolerant!dws Tolerant Systems, Inc. 408/946-5667