Wingz

Wingz is a spreadsheet package with unusually strong development tools. While originally sold as a spreadsheet and targeted towards the general market, the innovative 3D features the spreadsheet offered were not that enticing to the average spreadsheet user.

The Wingz spreadsheet however found a niche in financial institutions where its capabilities to handle larger spreadsheets than usual, strong graphics and visualisation capabilities, and a fairly capable programming language called "Hyperscript" made it a strong contender, but its ability to update sheets in real time was what really made it for the financial institutions. There was only one other spreadsheet program on the market that could do that, and it severely lacked in features compared to Wingz.

This meant that after version 1.3 the Wingz spreadsheet was primarily sold as a front end, with the company developing back end servers that interfaced with financial databases and fed data to the Wings program in real time, these were called simply "Real Time Server" and in addition to the built in Hyperscript programmability they company offered a separate package called HyperScript Tools that offered the components of the spreadsheet in a modular package that could be used to develop graphic front ends to databases. Hyperscript itself is an interesting scripting language that blended features from Apple's Hypercard with features from the company's more traditional Project Development Language a scripting and macro language that sports strong procedural features more commonly found in Basic or Pascal. HyperScript is very well suited to making simple front ends that interfaced with the visualisation engine, but could work as a full programming language on its own although as it was interpreted it did not offer the same speed as compiled languages such as C or Modula-2.

History
WingZ was a product that the USA based company Innovative Software started to talk about in 1985 as an entry to the Macintosh retail market, but IS was at the time a desktop automation software house that specialised in selling to the business channel on one hand and on the other directly to large organisations, with their primary product being a high end integrated office suite called Smartware that was available on DOS. The spreadsheet component of Smartware was simply called "Spreadsheet II" and although generally considered good or even excellent, customers often saw it as an inferior product to the PC spreadsheets of the day as they sported stronger graphical capabilities, rudimentary as they were, whereas Smartware placed much more emphasis in the desktop automation side of the software. The real strength of the Smartware package lay in its "Project Development Language", a structured procedural scripting language later renamed "Smart Programming Language" that alongside the applications themselves allowed companies to create highly specialised and automated office front ends that were impossible to attain with the simplistic macro languages that other office applications offered.

The company was interested in entering the software retail market, it had become obvious not only that it was a lucrative market on its own with companies buying personal computer in addition to or to replace terminals, but as companies like Computer Associates were finding out that success in the retail market opened doors for products in the institutional markets. Innovative Software decided to start developing a version of their "Spreadsheet II" product for the new Apple Macintosh platform, but the Mac offered excellent graphic capabilities for the day and sorely lacked business applications, the company started to talk about a forthcoming new product spreadsheet product called "WingZ" in Macintosh trade shows as early as 1986 with product delivery expected in early 1987.

After product development problems and what was probably a too ambitious an initial specification the company announced WingZ in early 1988 with delivery promised in the summer and versions for OS/2 and Microsoft Windows to be delivered in late 88 or early 89. In the end IS did not start delivery until February 1989 and by that time there were already four spreadsheet programs on the Mac that had strong graphic capabilities, and while Wingz raked in industry awards it soon became apparent that they had missed the bus when it came to sales.

Versions

 * Informix
 * 1989: 1.0
 * 1990: 1.1
 * 1991:
 * 1992:


 * IISC
 * 1995: 1.4.1
 * 1995: 1.4.2
 * 1995: 2.1 - Windows
 * 1996: 2.1.1 - Linux
 * 2.5.2 - Macintosh
 * Jul 1998: Wingz 3.0 - Windows 98/NT
 * Dec 1998: 3.1 - Linux, Windows95/98/NT, Solaris, AIX, SunOS, HPUX, IRIX, Mac

License

 * Commercial software

Author

 * Innovative Software (Original Author)
 * Informix
 * Investment Intelligence Systems Group (IISG)

Publications

 * Frederic Emery Davis, Elna Tymes: Mastering Wingz, Bantam Books 1989, ISBN 0-553-34706-3
 * Neil J. Salkind: Power of WingZ, Scott Foresman 1990, ISBN 0-673-38603-1

Links

 * Informix Wingz (short intro with screenshots of German version for OS/2)