Full Impact
Encyclopedia
Full Impact was a spreadsheet program for the Apple Macintosh computer released by Ashton-Tate
in the late 1980s. Full Impact was known for excellent graphing and visual display, far better than contemporary versions of Microsoft Excel
. But this was also its only really compelling feature, and it was unable to find a market niche given the dominance of Excel in the Macintosh marketplace.
decided to write a spreadsheet program. Wigginton had left Apple during the Macintosh development process to start Encore Systems with two friends, Don Breuner and Ed Ruder. They were soon hired by Steve Jobs
to develop a word processor for the soon-to-be-released Macintosh, which would become MacWrite
. Wigginton wanted to duplicate this success by making a GUI
-based spreadsheet that would be easier to use than anything on the market. Unlike a word processor, however, a spreadsheet requires a complex "engine" to quickly solve the many equations that make it up.
Starting in September 1984, shortly after the Mac's release, Wigginton and his two partners started looking for an engine, and were introduced to Richard Ross by an Apple employee. They agreed that Encore would adapt a GUI to Ross's engine, which would become MacCalc. It was not long before these plans started to fall apart. Ross wanted to retain control the product and sell it through his company, Bravo Technologies, while Wigginton and his partners felt it would be much wiser to license it to a larger company, and that Ross was pushing them out of the decision making. Eventually they decided to look for another partner, and shortly thereafter Wigginton met with several employees of Ashton-Tate and presented a demo of their existing prototype program. Ashton-Tate was interested, and agreed to fund development of the product in exchange for marketing rights.
They used the prototype GUI created for MacCalc along with a new engine, Alembic, (written by Queue Associates) and almost completely rewritten by Les Vogel to create the Glass project, also known as Pegasus. This head start
should have allowed the product to ship fairly quickly. Instead, Ashton-Tate vacillated between being extremely interested in the Macintosh market, considering it a way to break out of their dBASE
-dominated PC line, and then being completely ambivalent about it. This vacillation appears to have been based largely on Mac sales reports; when sales were up the Mac was Ashton-Tate's next big thing, when sales dropped it wasn't worth bothering with. When interested, Encore's development funds would arrive on time – when they weren't, the money would disappear for months. The Encore team was repeatedly forced to take on other projects in order to pay the bills, stretching what should have been a short project into a several-year ordeal.
Then, just when the product was finally ready to ship, Ross decided to sue Ashton-Tate, claiming he had rights to the program. Ross lost the case and today it is considered one of the classic examples of intellectual property rights law. Ross went on to release his version as MacCalc, and gained very positive reviews.
With the lawsuit out of the way, the product finally started shipping in August 1988, with the new name Full Impact. A minor upgrade, 1.1, followed in December. Reviews were generally positive, noting in particular how the system allowed you to have up to eight "subsheets" within any document. This feature is common today, but at the time it was considered novel and extremely useful. Full Impact was also one of the first spreadsheets to allow typing data and formulas directly into the cells, a feature that is still fairly poorly implemented today. Reviewers were also pleased with the powerful macro language, which included functionality such WHILE loops. But certainly the most lauded feature was that Full Impact allowed you to include other objects, such as text blocks, charts or pictures, directly on top of the sheets. At the time, most spreadsheets displayed these items in separate views.
After the delays, the timing turned out to be particularly bad. Microsoft had recently shipped Excel 3.0, which was off to a strong start. Only shortly after Full Impact was released, Informix Wingz
shipped, and was heavily marketed--including sending their frontman, Leonard Nimoy
, around to various Macintosh-related trade shows. Ashton-Tate positioned the product as a "presentation spreadsheet" to focus on its graphics capabilities, but it seems the term meant as much to potential customers then as it does today.
Sales of Full Impact were predictably soft as a result, as were Ashton-Tate's other Mac products, FullWrite Professional
and dBASE Mac
, which suffered from various problems. Ashton-Tate didn't take this as a signal to fix them, and instead ignored all of the products for the next year or so. Finally, in late 1989, a round of upgrades to FullWrite and Full Impact were announced. Full Impact 2.0s was released in 1990, including 3-D charts and the ability to include voice notes, a major feature of a coincident release of FullWrite 1.5s as well. A separate release in 1989 added Clear Access at $99, a 3rd party database linking technology based on Apple's CL/1
.
But this was also the point at which Ashton-Tate's cash cow
, dBASE
, failed. In 1990, they released dBASE IV, which was so buggy that customers generally refused to use it. Many took this as an opportunity to try out similar products, and discovered that FoxPro
and Clipper
had been better than dBASE for some time already. The company was soon bleeding money and gave up on the Mac market, ending development of their entire suite.
By 1991, the company was becoming insolvent and was purchased by Borland
for cents on the dollar. Unfortunately, Borland had their own spreadsheet battling with Excel on Windows, Quattro Pro
, and they immediately ended sales of Full Impact. Attempts by the authors to take back the product failed, and it disappeared.
Ashton-Tate
Ashton-Tate was a US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. Ashton-Tate grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation...
in the late 1980s. Full Impact was known for excellent graphing and visual display, far better than contemporary versions of Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
. But this was also its only really compelling feature, and it was unable to find a market niche given the dominance of Excel in the Macintosh marketplace.
History
Full Impact started in a roundabout fashion when early Apple employee and programmer Randy WiggintonRandy Wigginton
Randy Wigginton was one of Apple Computer's first employees , creator of MacWrite, Full Impact, and numerous other Mac applications. He used to work in development at eBay, Quigo, Inc and Move.com. In Nov 2010 he left his position as a "Site Reliability Engineer" at Google Inc., purportedly after...
decided to write a spreadsheet program. Wigginton had left Apple during the Macintosh development process to start Encore Systems with two friends, Don Breuner and Ed Ruder. They were soon hired by Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
to develop a word processor for the soon-to-be-released Macintosh, which would become MacWrite
MacWrite
MacWrite was a word processor application released along with the first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. It was the first such program that was widely available to the public to offer WYSIWYG operation, with multiple fonts and styles...
. Wigginton wanted to duplicate this success by making a GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...
-based spreadsheet that would be easier to use than anything on the market. Unlike a word processor, however, a spreadsheet requires a complex "engine" to quickly solve the many equations that make it up.
Starting in September 1984, shortly after the Mac's release, Wigginton and his two partners started looking for an engine, and were introduced to Richard Ross by an Apple employee. They agreed that Encore would adapt a GUI to Ross's engine, which would become MacCalc. It was not long before these plans started to fall apart. Ross wanted to retain control the product and sell it through his company, Bravo Technologies, while Wigginton and his partners felt it would be much wiser to license it to a larger company, and that Ross was pushing them out of the decision making. Eventually they decided to look for another partner, and shortly thereafter Wigginton met with several employees of Ashton-Tate and presented a demo of their existing prototype program. Ashton-Tate was interested, and agreed to fund development of the product in exchange for marketing rights.
They used the prototype GUI created for MacCalc along with a new engine, Alembic, (written by Queue Associates) and almost completely rewritten by Les Vogel to create the Glass project, also known as Pegasus. This head start
Head start (positioning)
In positioning, a head start is a start in advance of the starting position of others in competition, or simply toward the finish line or desired outcome...
should have allowed the product to ship fairly quickly. Instead, Ashton-Tate vacillated between being extremely interested in the Macintosh market, considering it a way to break out of their dBASE
DBASE
dBase II was the first widely used database management system for microcomputers. It was originally published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on ported to the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS...
-dominated PC line, and then being completely ambivalent about it. This vacillation appears to have been based largely on Mac sales reports; when sales were up the Mac was Ashton-Tate's next big thing, when sales dropped it wasn't worth bothering with. When interested, Encore's development funds would arrive on time – when they weren't, the money would disappear for months. The Encore team was repeatedly forced to take on other projects in order to pay the bills, stretching what should have been a short project into a several-year ordeal.
Then, just when the product was finally ready to ship, Ross decided to sue Ashton-Tate, claiming he had rights to the program. Ross lost the case and today it is considered one of the classic examples of intellectual property rights law. Ross went on to release his version as MacCalc, and gained very positive reviews.
With the lawsuit out of the way, the product finally started shipping in August 1988, with the new name Full Impact. A minor upgrade, 1.1, followed in December. Reviews were generally positive, noting in particular how the system allowed you to have up to eight "subsheets" within any document. This feature is common today, but at the time it was considered novel and extremely useful. Full Impact was also one of the first spreadsheets to allow typing data and formulas directly into the cells, a feature that is still fairly poorly implemented today. Reviewers were also pleased with the powerful macro language, which included functionality such WHILE loops. But certainly the most lauded feature was that Full Impact allowed you to include other objects, such as text blocks, charts or pictures, directly on top of the sheets. At the time, most spreadsheets displayed these items in separate views.
After the delays, the timing turned out to be particularly bad. Microsoft had recently shipped Excel 3.0, which was off to a strong start. Only shortly after Full Impact was released, Informix Wingz
Informix Wingz
Wingz was a spreadsheet program sold by Informix in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Originally developed for the Macintosh, it was later distributed on Microsoft Windows, OS/2, NextStep and several other commercial flavors of Unix...
shipped, and was heavily marketed--including sending their frontman, Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Simon Nimoy is an American actor, film director, poet, musician and photographer. Nimoy's most famous role is that of Spock in the original Star Trek series , multiple films, television and video game sequels....
, around to various Macintosh-related trade shows. Ashton-Tate positioned the product as a "presentation spreadsheet" to focus on its graphics capabilities, but it seems the term meant as much to potential customers then as it does today.
Sales of Full Impact were predictably soft as a result, as were Ashton-Tate's other Mac products, FullWrite Professional
FullWrite Professional
FullWrite Professional was a word processor application for the Apple Macintosh, released in late 1988 by Ashton-Tate. Though it was released a year later than promised and had a number of problems, it developed a faithful following and some amount of commercial success...
and dBASE Mac
DBASE Mac
dBASE Mac was a database management system for the Apple Macintosh, released by Ashton-Tate in 1987. Although the GUI was lauded in the press, the new application was so slow that it became something of a joke in the industry...
, which suffered from various problems. Ashton-Tate didn't take this as a signal to fix them, and instead ignored all of the products for the next year or so. Finally, in late 1989, a round of upgrades to FullWrite and Full Impact were announced. Full Impact 2.0s was released in 1990, including 3-D charts and the ability to include voice notes, a major feature of a coincident release of FullWrite 1.5s as well. A separate release in 1989 added Clear Access at $99, a 3rd party database linking technology based on Apple's CL/1
Data Access Language
Data Access Language, or simply DAL, was a SQL-like language parser released by Apple Computer in 1990 to provide unified client/server access to database management systems. It was known for poor performance and high costs, something Apple did little to address over its short lifetime at Apple....
.
But this was also the point at which Ashton-Tate's cash cow
Cash cow
In business, a cash cow is a product or a business unit that generates unusually high profit margins: so high that it is responsible for a large amount of a company's operating profit...
, dBASE
DBASE
dBase II was the first widely used database management system for microcomputers. It was originally published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on ported to the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS...
, failed. In 1990, they released dBASE IV, which was so buggy that customers generally refused to use it. Many took this as an opportunity to try out similar products, and discovered that FoxPro
FoxPro
' has two meanings:*Visual FoxPro, an object-oriented programming language and RDBMS, published by Microsoft, for Microsoft Windows*FoxPro 2, a text-based procedural programming language and DBMS, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh,...
and Clipper
Clipper programming language
Clipper is a computer programming language that is used to create software programs that originally operated primarily under DOS. Although it is a powerful general-purpose programming language, it was primarily used to create database/business programs....
had been better than dBASE for some time already. The company was soon bleeding money and gave up on the Mac market, ending development of their entire suite.
By 1991, the company was becoming insolvent and was purchased by Borland
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
for cents on the dollar. Unfortunately, Borland had their own spreadsheet battling with Excel on Windows, Quattro Pro
Quattro Pro
Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Corel, most often as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office.Historically, Quattro Pro used keyboard commands similar to Lotus 1-2-3. It is commonly said to have been the first program to use tabbed sheets. Actually, Boeing Calc...
, and they immediately ended sales of Full Impact. Attempts by the authors to take back the product failed, and it disappeared.