Trapeze is a discontinued spreadsheet program for Macintosh systems running classic Mac OS. It introduced the concept of using named ranges for most operations instead of cell addresses, allowing formulas to be freed of the location of the data on the page. This, in turn, made updating the sheets by moving data around a safe operation, whereas in contemporary programs like Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 this often led to broken formulas. The system did not rely on the sheet as the basis for storage, and allowed multiple tables, charts, graphics and text, which they referred to as "blocks", to be positioned freely.
Introduced in January 1987 at MacWorld San Francisco, sales were not strong and the company formed to introduce the product was insolvent by the fall. The company was purchased by a minicomputer software vendor as part of an effort to break into the microcomputer market, but they decided to exit the business and sold it off again to a new company, DeltaPoint, in 1989. When DeltaPoint's DeltaGraph became a huge hit later that year, sales of Trapeze were ended.
This basic concept of using separate blocks of data and their names to create formulas was the major feature of Lotus Improv, introduced in 1990. This concept is also seen in the modern Apple Numbers.
History
Conception
In 1984, after seeing the Macintosh computer, Andrew Wulf quit his job at a defence contractor and started a small consulting firm to work on microcomputers. Their first products were a series of Multiplan spreadsheets for the oil and gas market, but these did not sell well. While working on them, Wulf was constantly irritated by the way minor changes to the spreadsheet layout would cause the formulas to stop working. While considering this, Wulf hit upon the idea of "blocks", which would isolate inputs into separate named sections and the formulas could be applied to the names, not the cell references. This meant that the blocks could move and the formulas would still work.
Development
Wulf's office was a shared space, and one of the other groups included someone who was familiar with startups. He offered to arrange funding for the development of the new product, in exchange for shares in a new company to write it. This resulted in the creation of Data Tailor. With the funding secured in the summer of 1985, Wulf hired two friends, Bob Murphy and Ken Clark, one from college and one from his previous job, to help him write the system. They decided to write the system in the C programming language, although Pascal was far more common on the Mac at that time. The C system, which featured the "world's slowest linker", was run on a Macintosh XL and tested on a Mac 128.
The program was running in partial form in time for the August 1986 meeting of Mac developers at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco; at the time these were known as the AppleWorld Conference, becoming the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 1990. They then went to MacWorld Boston the same month, where they saw many new products with GUIs that were far better than what they had created. Wulf decided to write an entirely new GUI on top of the still-evolving engine that Murphy and Clark were working on, aiming to have the resulting system ready for MacWorld San Francisco in January 1987. It was during this time that the name was chosen when one of the people in the office asked if they had heard of the band Trapeze.
Release
Prior to the show, they placed a teaser advertisement in Macworld, which led people to believe the ad was from Ashton-Tate. The first working version was ready only hours before it was time to leave for San Francisco. The product drew considerable attention, not only for its internal capabilities, but also for its use of hierarchical menus, which were a relatively recent invention and not yet supported within the operating system. Trapeze was released into an already crowded spreadsheet market. It nevertheless garnered praise for its unconventional layout and the wide selection of powerful modelling capabilities. It also directly supported the Motorola 68881 floating point unit, which gave it much higher performance than the competition, at least on machines that included this processor.