Wingz

Description

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, retail price was high and distribution not all that good, and coupled with a tendency that maker Informix had to announce versions and ports years before they arrived, and when they arrived not all features that had been promised, the program got a reception in the marketplace that can only be described as lukewarm and not that enviable a reputation.

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 more commonly found in Basic, it was very well suited to making simple front ends that interfaced with the visualisation engine.

History

Wingz 1990 advert
Announcing the availability of versions for Windows 3.0 and OS/2

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 an integrated text-mode office suite called Smartware that was available on Unix system although a DOS port did shop up. The spreadsheet component of Smartware was simply called "Spreadsheet II" and although generally considered good, customers often saw it as an inferior product to the PC spreadsheets of the day as they sported graphical capabilities, rudimentary as they were, that a cross platform product like Smartware simply could not offer as many of their target platforms had no graphic capabilities whatsoever.

The company was also 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

Versions

• Last OS/2 version: 1.4
• Last version to run under WinOS/2: 2.5, a beta of v3 in two different version (standard and pro) was released but it is unsure if a GA version was ever released.

Author

• Innovative Software (Original Author)
• Informix
• Investment Intelligence Systems Group