Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!captkidd
From: captkidd@athena.mit.edu (Ivan Cavero Belaunde)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Excel 2.2 due out soon (Yeah, right!)
Message-ID: <11110@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 4 May 89 15:49:15 GMT
References: <7091@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: captkidd@athena.mit.edu (Ivan Cavero Belaunde)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 52

In article <7091@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> mithomas@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Michael Thomas Niehaus) writes:
>Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Excel 2.2 for the Macintosh will be out
>sometime around the end of the second quarter.  It finally lifts the 1MB memory
>limit, and has other new functions, including increased speed and mixed 
>fonts/styles.

Well, they say so, but then again, Word 4.0 was supposed to be out
Real Soon Now about a year ago.  I'll believe it when I see it.
They better get it out soon, though, or Wingz is going to give them
a real run for their money.  Its power as an application-development
tool should trounce Excel, just like Excel's overall performance is
crushing 123 in the MSDOS world.  Excel's upgrade should have not only
fancier visuals, but better performace on higher-level (ie 881/2 equipped)
Macs than now (possibly including an INIT similar to Radius' to patch
SANE calls?).  Granted Wingz is SLOW on a +/SE, but a lot of # crunching
is done on higher performance Macs these days (II[x/cx]/SEx).  The
Benchmarks in the current MacUser show that Wingz is significantly faster
than Excel and Full Impact on high performance machines (testing
was performed on a 5MB Mac II).

>This release is supposed to use the main "engine" of the upcoming version of
>MS-DOS and/or OS/2 Excel.  That seems kind of strange to me, but if they say
>so...

I read something about this in PC Week.  It seems that they are designing
the internal structure so that their PC and Mac programs share as much
code as possible.  I assume they do this by using an identical "engine"
written in C and then having other sections of code for the actual IO/user
interface/operating environment interface.  Remember their MSDOS stuff
runs under Windows, a MacOS copy.

>-Michael

-Ivan Cavero Belaunde

	"Sir Francis Drake and all his ships set out for Calais Bay
	They'd heard the Spanish rum fleet was headed out that way.
	But the Engineers had beat them, by a night and half a day,
	And though as drunk as ptarmigans, you still could hear them say:

	Chorus:
	We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers,
	We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers.
	Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum all day and come along with us,
	'Cause we don't give a damn for any old man
	Who don't give a damn for us!"

		-The MIT Engineers' Drinking Song

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