Mesa 2

Sundial Systems Mesa 2 v.2.2

A spreadsheet originally introduced for the NeXT workstation in 1992 by Athena Design Incorporated, and was marketed as a more traditional spreadsheet offering next to the likes of Lotus Improv and other worksheet programs available for the platform that were all 3D spreadsheets that used labels rather than the traditional row/column identifiers that PC users had gotten used to. The program was rewritten from scratch for OS/2 the year after and originally released as Mesa/2, but name was changed to "Mesa 2" shortly thereafter. The OS/2 version featured embeddability and strong REXX support in addition to the features it inherited from the NeXT version.

After original developer Athena Design stopped supporting the system they licensed the code for the OS/2 version to Sundial Systems who went on to greatly enhance the product and the NeXT version was licensed to P & L Systems who went on to port it to Mac OSX. Athena went on to write a new version of the program in Java that they released under the Mesa name, but later added multi-user capabilities and renamed the spreadsheet Integer.

Mesa had one trick up its sleeve that other spreadsheets miss, even today and we are only aware of one other example for the rather obscure OS-9 operating system that offered this feature, and that is the ability to do real time updates and trigger external events in response to the changes. This allows you for instance to hook your spreadsheet up to a real time feed, like a stock or price quote and alter the sheet and calculations in real time.

Note that there are more differences between the 2.3 version of Mesa released by Sundial and the version 2.0 by Athena than the mere .x increment might indicate, version 2 from Athena had a number of issues, both bugs and speed related issues that were solved in the Sundial release, in addition to new features. Mesa 2 is also one of the few applications that were available for OS/2 PPC, had support for OpenDoc and in fact was one of the few programs that were running under the Taligent OS as a native application and when Athena dropped all development for the system there was even a BeOS port under construction.

Links

• A support page for Mesa 2 users by Jim Larson and Michael Semon.
• A review of Mesa 2 version 2.0 by Infoworld magazine 1995.
• A review of Mesa 2 version 1.0 by Infoworld magazine 1994.
• Mesa 2 for OS/2 PPC product announcement
• The story of Athena Design by founder David Pollak.
• Copy of the Mesa 2 page at Sundial Systems webpage - From Archive.org
• SCOUG Sundial SIG - Has Mesa 2 tips and software

Authors & publishers

• David Pollak (Original author)
• J. Daniel Kulp (Post Mesa v1 additions for OS/2, OpenDoc code and all Sundial System releases of the system)
• Athena Design Inc.

Boston, Mass., USA

• Sundial Systems
• P & L Systems