The nuclear engineer who became a software founder

Part 1 – Inside the As-Easy-As story: How a passion for programming sparked an unexpected second career

In the early days of personal computing, developers built software by hand from first principles because they had to. This series shares the story behind As-Easy-As, the spreadsheet built from scratch, and the lessons learned along the way.

In the late 1980s, Paris Karahalios and Dave Schulz formed TRIUS Inc, first with a printer driver and later with a new spreadsheet called As-Easy-As. While many businesses used Lotus 1-2-3 as their spreadsheet app, As-Easy-As made it easier to analyze and display scientific datasets. As a result, As-Easy-As became invaluable for scientists and engineers, but its feature parity with Lotus meant that many people and small businesses turned to As-Easy-As instead of the more expensive 1-2-3. As an undergraduate physics student in the early 1990s, As-Easy-As spreadsheet was my most-used DOS application at the time, and it remains my favorite spreadsheet.

I interviewed Paris about the As-Easy-As spreadsheet, including how it was developed, and his personal background with programming. This is an in-depth look at an innovative program that was a standout in its field.

Introduction: Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Paris Karahalios. I have a BS and MS degrees in Nuclear Engineering with an option in Fusion and emphasis on Radiation accident analysis and health consequence modeling. I worked in the nuclear industry for about 10 years before I got into software development and IT around 1988. I started my third career about 10 years ago, when TRIUS stopped operating, as a senior technical project manager. I am currently the VP of Technical Project Management at Spire. I thoroughly enjoy what I do and the group of people I work with. I think of it as a continuous learning game, where I am called to solve new, challenging problems every day.

While in college, I became infatuated with computers and by the time I finished in 1980, I had become fairly proficient in using the CDC Cyber 6400 mainframe at school. By that time, I had also written a number of programs for the TI-59 programmable calculator with the magnetic cards, which were published in the PPX TI Library and I had written a payroll program for the TI-99/4a computer. (I had to save and load the program each time I used it from a handheld cassette recorder using a regular cassette – no DAT tapes yet.)

This is just a long-winded way of saying that I had become a computer geek early in life, and continue to be one to this date.

Read more: How to write your first FreeDOS program

How did you “discover” computers?

As part of the 3rd year curriculum, I had to take a course in FORTRAN. I found it interesting, but for some reason it didn’t click! It may have been that we didn’t have immediate access to the computer. The university was using an older Digital computer, with punch cards. We’d write the code long hand in a notebook, then go to the punch card terminals room and type it, to generate the punch cards, then put together the punch cards with a rubber band and drop them off in the computer operator inbox (the first card had our name, course, etc.).

We’d then have to wait until the next day, go to the computer operator room and get our printout (on the wide green lined computer paper). If the program had worked and gave us the correct (expected) results, we’d turn it in for grading. If it failed to execute, or gave the incorrect results because of errors in the coding, then we’d go back to the punch card terminals, make the corrections, generate new punch cards, drop them in the inbox of the computer operator and wait till the following day to get our results. And, if the programming was complex and/or you kept making errors in your coding, this iterative process would take days… Not a pleasant experience.

Then, in my senior year, I took a course in “numerical analysis with computers” and the university had just acquired a CDC Cyber 6400 main computer. Although we still used punch cards, turnaround time was now 1-2 hours. What progress–you could now afford to make coding mistakes and still get your code corrected and resubmitted a few times all in the same day! I started getting real interested, and getting “the bug,” but senior year was almost over, so…

I started on my master’s degree the following year, same university, same CDC computer, but now we didn’t have to use punch cards! We used DECwriters, connected to the computer! You type your code, submit it real time, it compiles, it executes and you get the results printed on the DECwriter, right away! At the same time, a course in Monte Carlo simulations with computers (required for grad school), taught by a brilliant professor and a Christmas present of a TI-59 programmable calculator–now I was hooked!

On top of it I get unlimited access to the PDP-9 computer of the nuclear center at the university. How many ways can you spell Happy! Still coding mostly in FORTRAN, using TI OpCodes to code on the TI-59, taught myself Basic and then moved on to Pascal. PCs were not available yet, Amiga and Commodore came out, but I looked at them more like game machines and I never got into computer games, so I never worked with them.

I did, however, purchase a TI-99/4A color console, which I used to write some short programs for operating a family restaurant. Became very familiar with CP/M and worked on a number of small side projects writing code for insurance companies, payroll companies. I had also started working and I now had access to an IBM System/360 and the job to write code to solve equations. It didn’t feel like a job, it felt like someone was paying me to have fun! Then, when the IBM PC came out it was all of a sudden, access to computers at a different, much lower level! Unix, C, Assembler,…

Read more: Command line magic: Extracting links with awk, grep, and tr

What was your first programming language?

I started coding in FORTRAN and continued coding in it for many years. When I started using PCs, I would also code in Basic, Pascal (and still some FORTRAN).

• Although not a high level language, I wrote lots of programs for the TI Professional Program Exchange (PPX) on the TI-59, mostly on nuclear-related subjects
• A payroll system for a restaurant with about 30 employees (TI Basic)
• A quality control system for safety related engineering drawings (MS Basic)
• An inventory control system (Pascal)

Did you use computers and programming to help you in your Nuclear Engineering program?

Yes, I spent a lot of time during my graduate studies and after I started working, in front of a punch card machine, a DECwriter, or a monitor working on nuclear-related programs. Some of them were utilities to prep data, others were programs to calculate complex multi-member radioactive decay and some were custom, specialized code to inject into large code systems we’d acquire from one of the National Labs.

What was your first personal computer? What did you find exciting about it?

I mentioned that the first computer I had fun with was a CDC Cyber 6400 mainframe. It gave me the opportunity to write code to numerically solve mathematical models that up until then, to me, seemed unsolvable! But the real joy came when the PC and DOS arrived, because I could now access the computer at its lowest level! I could not afford a true blue PC, so I bought a compatible, SANYO MBC-550-2 with 256K RAM, two floppy drives and a monochrome monitor. I reasoned that I needed to buy it because I was doing a side job for a small company that was using Lotus 1-2-3 for their business and I needed to have something at home to work on the project, so I wouldn’t have to go to their location every day. It was an excuse to buy the PC, but…

I was so happy when I brought it home, unpacked it and fired it up. My own computer! The client provided me with a license for Lotus 1-2-3 the next day, and to my dismay, Lotus 1-2-3 would not work on my SANYO. I came to find out that in order to make it work, I needed a piggyback board to make the video compatible with the IBM PC. It came with DOS 2.11 and CP/M 86. I bought the board and was able to run the program, but found quite a number of incompatibilities along the way.

Thanks to Paris for this deep dive into the As-Easy-As spreadsheet and how it was developed. Paris shared more details than I could fit into one interview, and you can get more details in my interview at Technically We Write about writing the manual, and in my interview at Coaching Buttons about growing TRIUS Inc as a company.

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Next in the interview series, we look at how Chernobyl, scientific plotting, and a new kind of need shaped the heart of As-Easy-As.

Read the entire interview series

• Part 2: Building As-Easy-As: A spreadsheet born out of scientific need
• Part 3: Inside the shareware era: Features, bugs, and programming in DOS
• Part 4: Lessons from DOS, Turbo Pascal, and hardware constraints

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• Building As-Easy-As: A spreadsheet born out of scientific need
• Command line magic: Extracting links with awk, grep, and tr
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• How to write your first FreeDOS program