Mesa 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 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.
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. This allows you 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. Mesa 2 is also one of the few applications that were available for OS/2 PPC and had support for OpenDoc.
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.
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