Building As-Easy-As: A spreadsheet born out of scientific need

Inside the As-Easy-As story: The rise of As-Easy-As as a viable competitor to Lotus 1-2-3.

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.

You were a co-founder of TRIUS. How did the company start?

In 1984-85, I was working in the Nuclear Division of a large AE firm in Boston (Stone & Webster Engineering Co), where I was spending most of my time on mathematical and computer modeling of nuclear accident consequences, using IBM-360 mainframes.

Personal Computers were becoming popular and the company bought a true blue IBM PC-XT for each of the groups. Real powerful at the time, IBM PC-XT with two double-sided 5.25″ floppy drives, 256 KB RAM and a single application – Lotus 1-2-3. We had to sign-up early in the day, or the day before, to reserve time on the shared PC, it was a hot item!

Some of us Stone & Webster employees formed a PC-Users group, where we met once a week, during lunch, and discussed the latest updates to PCs, new software, ideas on how to use PCs in new ways, etc. I met Dave Schulz in one of those meetings and we started hanging around. Dave was a Civil/Piping Engineer working in a different division of the same company, but his fundamental knowledge of computers, computing, and software was unmatched! It was as if his brain worked in the decimal system for day-to-day life, and in bits and bytes at a native CPU level when it came to computers. I was impressed with his depth of knowledge and ability to translate theory into computer code then, and for the remaining 28+ years we worked together!

While I was fascinated with the capabilities of Lotus 1-2-3, he had just purchased a copy of Turbo Pascal and was dissecting the rudimentary grid (spreadsheet) sample app that came with it. Pretty soon, he started expanding its capabilities and we started to meet at his desk, discuss and review progress every day. It was still a basic program, but it was continuously improved.

At the time, 9-pin dot matrix printers were becoming inexpensive, but the print quality was lousy. 24-pin printers could generate “letter quality” print, but were very expensive. Dave and I spent time understanding how the printers were driven through the interrupts and wrote a .COM program (written at the command line with the debugger included on the DOS floppy disk). When it ran, it would terminate and stay resident, it would interrupt BIOS calls to the printer and would then take over and manipulate the print head, so that a cheap inexpensive 9-pin printer could print “letter quality” text. We thought we could make some extra (side) money selling the program.

Something not many people know is that Dave and I formed TRIUS so that we could continue developing and marketing the Printer Enhancement program (if I recall correctly, it was less than 80 bytes long). In the meantime, work on the “spreadsheet” program continued. One of Dave’s co-workers had cutely nicknamed it “As-Easy-AS 1-2-3” (a play on “Lotus 1-2-3”). We had reached the point where the program could now read and write Lotus 1-2-3 (.WKS) files – a breakthrough! All while Dave and I were still working for Stone & Webster.

You co-created the As-Easy-As spreadsheet for DOS. How did that come about? Why write a spreadsheet?

On April 26, 1986 the Chernobyl reactor accident took place. Because I had done a lot of research and had published a number of technical papers on Reactor Accident Consequence Analyses, a month or so later the state department selected me to be the US delegate to the first meeting of Group of Experts in Consequence Analyses (GRECA) meeting in Paris France (Russia would not allow us to go to Chernobyl, yet). The meeting was attended by one delegate from each of 62 countries, to discuss the accident, validate mathematical prediction models and advise governments on next actions.

At the end of the meeting, it was decided that all radiation measurements reports for every country (the radioactive plume was travelling around the world) would be sent to me (in the US) where we would validate it, analyze it and use it to possibly determine (a) the level of damage to the Chernobyl reactor core, and (b) movement and depletion of the radioactive plume over the world.

When I came back to the US and the data started arriving on a daily basis, I reserved the group’s PC exclusively each day of the week and realized that we needed additional storage. We purchased two external Bernoulli drives (the original model, using the 8.5″x11″, thick, Bernoulli disks, each storing a whopping 5 MB worth of data). We solved the data storage problem. We were using Lotus 1-2-3 to do all the data manipulation, which served us well, but we had a new issue. We needed to generate plots of the tabulated data and the Lotus 1-2-3 graphing capabilities (which were primarily meant for business) could not adequately handle the log/exponential curves we needed to plot needed for radioactivity decay.

Dave and I decided that the way to solve the problem was to spend more time on the development of As-Easy-As and focus on scientific plotting. Once these capabilities were in place (in a matter of a month or so), we started using As-Easy-As for analyzing the Chernobyl data and preparing the reports.

No more printer enhancement software, we now started concentrating on the further development of As-Easy-As.

As-Easy-As was shareware. What was “shareware” and how did that work out as a business model?

There are a number of varying stories as to who first coined the term “shareware.” Andrew Fluegelman is credited with first releasing his program PC-Talk as “freeware,” and Jim Button (Knopf) releasing his PC-File program as “shareware.” Bob Wallace, the developer of PC-Write, always mentioned those two as the ones who started the revolution. There are many other software developers and small start-ups that went on to build successful companies using the “shareware” business model like Bob Wallace (PC-Write), Marshall Magee (Automenu), Tom Rawson (4DOS), Phil Katz (PKZIP), Scott Miller (Kingdom of Kroz), John McAfee (McAfee Antivirus), Apogee Software, and id Software, who could all be called “the grandfathers of shareware,” in a way. (I’m sure I’m forgetting a few dozen names…)

In any case, it was a fairly straightforward business model. You develop a software program for the PC. You give free copies of it to people so they can try it, encouraging that they give free copies to others. In the early days, if they liked it and they continued using it, you asked for a donation. Later on, programmers asked for payment that entitled users to discounted upgrades, a printed manual, technical support, etc. All this in an environment where mainstream software publishers were taking full page ads in computer magazines announcing that copying their software, even for solely back-up purposes, was illegal. Shareware became the de-facto business model for individual developers and small companies.

Some shareware companies would turn off certain functions after the evaluation period (eventually called crippleware), while others, like TRIUS would never disable any features, but would display a reminder to register when you started the program. Yet other companies would display the registration notice every XX keystrokes, or every YY screen displays, which eventually made them known as “nagware.”

The shareware concept was ideal for those early days of PCs. It worked for users, because they could try hundreds of programs, before deciding if they were willing to pay for some of them and it worked for the developers because they could release a program into the “sharing” community with zero marketing budget, generate a captive audience, get useful feedback, and make some money.

Having said that, a lot of shareware companies, including TRIUS, eventually ended up spending capital on marketing and advertising in computer magazines of the era, as well as placing their products in retail channels and private labeling them for larger well known publishers.

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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Up next: Inside the shareware movement—and how As-Easy-As reached thousands without a big marketing budget.

Read the entire interview series

• Part 1: The nuclear engineer who became a software founder
• 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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