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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.
230:. 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.
253:-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 was not worth bothering with. When interested, Encore's development funds would arrive on time—when they were not, 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.
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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
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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
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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
283:, which suffered from various problems. Ashton-Tate did not 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.
272:, 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.
222:-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.
310:, 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
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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
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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,
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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.
194:. 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.
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in the late 1980s. Full Impact was known for excellent graphing and visual display, far better than contemporary versions of
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along with a new engine, Alembic, (written by Queue
Associates) and almost completely rewritten by Les Vogel to create the
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decided to write a spreadsheet program. Wigginton had left Apple during the
Macintosh development process to start
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for cents on the dollar. Unfortunately, Borland had their own spreadsheet battling with Excel on
Windows,
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Sales of Full Impact were predictably soft as a result, as were Ashton-Tate's other Mac products,
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to develop a word processor for the soon-to-be-released
Macintosh, which would become
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Full Impact started in a roundabout fashion when early Apple employee and programmer
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and the ability to include voice notes, a major feature of a coincident release of
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417:"Ashton-Tate Full Impact Mac Spreadsheet Focusses on Presentation, Reporting"
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Correspondence with Ed Ruder, one of the original authors at Encore
Systems.
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shipped, and was heavily marketed—including sending their frontman,
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with two friends, Don
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at $ 99, a 3rd party database linking technology based on Apple's
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By 1991, the company was becoming insolvent and was purchased by
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Spreadsheet should make full impact on Mac software arena.
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218:. Wigginton wanted to duplicate this success by making a
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46:. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
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295:as well. A separate release in 1989 added
410:"Richard Ross v. Ashton-Tate Corporation"
106:Learn how and when to remove this message
233:They used the prototype GUI created for
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384:"Spreadsheet Program Amazingly Speedy"
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44:adding citations to reliable sources
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371:Ashton-Tate Corporation v. Ross
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458:Full Impact 1.1 Review
344:FullWrite Professional
277:FullWrite Professional
186:computer released by
805:Spreadsheet software
550:Proprietary freeware
502:Free and open-source
40:improve this article
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784:Online spreadsheet
680:IBM Lotus Symphony
257:positive reviews.
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55:"Full Impact"
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51:Find sources:
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29:This article
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695:Lotus Improv
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607:Discontinued
494:Spreadsheets
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398:Bibliography
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382:Doug Green,
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297:Clear Access
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125:Developer(s)
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38:Please help
33:verification
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690:Lotus 1-2-3
660:Full Impact
625:Boeing Calc
597:Quattro Pro
523:LibreOffice
406:Ross v. A-T
327:Quattro Pro
188:Ashton-Tate
180:Full Impact
172:Spreadsheet
130:Ashton-Tate
119:Full Impact
766:Comparison
638:StarOffice
620:As-Easy-As
615:AppleWorks
528:OpenOffice
350:References
289:3-D charts
247:head start
212:Steve Jobs
96:April 2014
66:newspapers
725:SuperCalc
710:Multiplan
700:Lucid 3-D
653:NeoOffice
592:PlanMaker
421:InfoWorld
388:InfoWorld
339:dBASE Mac
281:dBASE Mac
799:Category
754:Category
735:VisiCalc
670:GNU Oleo
560:(online)
540:Pyspread
535:Gnumeric
333:See also
308:cash cow
216:MacWrite
155:Platform
730:T/Maker
444:MacWEEK
323:Borland
316:Clipper
245:. This
243:Pegasus
235:MacCalc
228:MacCalc
198:History
146:1988-08
144: (
80:scholar
685:KCells
574:Retail
434:PCWeek
312:FoxPro
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75:
68:
61:
53:
648:Go-oo
634:Calc
514:Calc
355:Notes
251:dBASE
239:Glass
87:JSTOR
73:books
778:List
720:Siag
314:and
301:CL/1
279:and
167:Type
59:news
408:),
220:GUI
42:by
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Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.
