Javelin Software

~ the obit ~

Rob Firmin had done doctorate research at the University of Chicago and financial planning work at Prime Computer, and what came out of both was a complaint about how spreadsheets were built. In February 1983 he and Stan Kugell went to a cabin in Vermont to work the idea out. Javelin Software Corporation was running in Cambridge, Massachusetts by 1984, Firmin as chairman and chief executive, Kugell as president, with Chris Herot running engineering. The development team included Charles Frankston, whose brother Bob had co-written VisiCalc.

Javelin reached the American market in October 1985 at 695 dollars, against Lotus 1-2-3 at 495, which is a difficult position to sell from when the cheaper product is the one everybody already knows. The reviews did not help the price and did help the reputation. PC Magazine gave it a Best of 1985 for technical excellence and PC Week called it the most significant product of the year. InfoWorld named it Product of the Year for 1985, over Microsoft's new Excel. Ashton-Tate took it outside the United States and Canada from April 1986, through its own subsidiaries in Britain, West Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Australia.

Javelin Plus shipped in 1987. The company was reportedly set to go public that autumn, with the offering scheduled for a few days after the market fell apart on 19 October, and the offering did not happen. That account comes from Wikipedia and from a memoir by Josh Bernoff, who ran documentation at Javelin, rather than from a prospectus anyone has produced. Whatever the precise mechanism, the company did not recover. On 6 February 1989 the trade wire Computergram reported that Information Resources Inc of Waltham, Massachusetts had acquired the assets of Javelin Software Corp of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on undisclosed terms. English Wikipedia dates the company 1984 to 1988 and files it under companies disestablished in 1988. The asset sale is a 1989 story.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ variables, not cells ~

A spreadsheet model lives in its cells, which means the model is a side effect of a layout. Javelin inverted that. The things you built with were variables, each one an object that knew its own name, its own time dimension, and every other variable it was connected to. A time series was a single object rather than a row that happened to run left to right. Calculation worked on the objects, so adding two series lined them up in calendar time without being asked, and subtracting January's costs from January's revenues worked regardless of where either number was sitting, or whether it was on screen at all.

The consequences were the point. Deleting a row or a column or a whole worksheet could not destroy data, because the data was not in the worksheet. Costs entered weekly against revenues entered monthly could be allocated or interpolated rather than refused. Whole models could reference each other by variable name. The pivot table arrived in the mainstream years later as a feature; here it fell out of the design.

~ reading somebody else's work ~

Javelin's own description of itself was a central information base surrounded by ten views, each one a different way into the same model: Table, Worksheet, Chart, Quick Graph, Graph, Formulas, Diagram, Notes, Errors, Macro. They were linked, so a change in one showed up in the others. The Diagram view let you walk the connections between variables and see the roots and branches of any one of them.

Nothing that came after kept that property. A complex Javelin model could be handed to somebody who had no role in building it and be taken apart, because the logic was a traversable structure rather than a thousand formulas referring to grid coordinates. The spreadsheet auditing disasters of the forty years since all come out of the design Javelin had rejected. Wikipedia says twelve views and then lists ten; the company's own 1986 press release and its 1987 advertising both say ten.

~ who it was for ~

Javelin went into corporate and government financial modeling. It also turned up in college chemistry teaching and, per its own article, in the military early in the Strategic Defense Initiative. The World Bank modeled the world's economies in it and handed those models around in Javelin format for years afterward. That is a sentence about a user base, and I was never anywhere near it. This was DOS business software sold by salesmen to institutions, in a decade when my own contact with a computer was still some years off and several thousand kilometers away.

~ the dinner, and the afterlife ~

The InfoWorld award produced the one Javelin story that still circulates. Michael McCarthy, the magazine's reviews editor from 1984 to 1990, told InfoWorld's own anniversary issue in 1998 that he had pushed the award through himself, and that at the InfoWorld dinner at Comdex, when Product of the Year was announced and Excel came second, Bill Gates got up and walked out of the room in front of everybody in what McCarthy called a spectacularly rude manner. It is one man's recollection twelve years after the fact, from the man who picked the winner.

Lotus took two of Javelin's ideas, named data arrays and pivot tables, and put them on NeXTSTEP as Improv, which had the advantage of not being built on 1980s DOS memory. Information Resources kept selling the product after the company was gone, and Javelin Plus reached version 3.5 in 1993. Oracle is usually blamed for finishing it off, and the usual version of that is wrong twice: on 12 June 1995, not 1994, Oracle bought the assets of IRI Software's online analytical processing business for 100 million dollars in cash, and the press release states plainly that IRI Software would keep its identity as a business of Information Resources. Oracle bought a product line, not the company that had bought Javelin.

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