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Brad Weed's avatar

I'm glad you called out Duane Campbell as having both a big brain and a big heart. My experience was he wasn't alone. I'm thinking of you, Jon DeVaan. There was a humanity that pervaded many early 'Office folks' that rubbed off on even more. Kind, patient, and whip-smart. Not a bad combination.

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Jon DeVaan's avatar

Windows 3.0 was a huge breakthrough for app developers. Windows 2 was hamstrung by the 1mb RAM limit of MS-DOS. There were memory expansion kits available like the Intel AboveBoard(tm) (a little marketing of complexity for you, as "AboveBoard" meant 4 64k segments of memory above the 640k limit and IO commands that mapped up to 4mb of RAM into those 4 segments). With Windows 3.0 there was ample memory, all addressed using the 16 bit segment and index registers of the Intel architecture. It gave a lot of space for apps to grow in capabilities in theory up to 16mb. PCs could start to deliver on their promise of "real" apps and running more than one app at a time (although that didn't really happen until Windows 95). The biggest problem Excel has was it had a few algorithms that did "peek ahead reads" that worked fine in real mode but in protected mode all of those speculative reads became memory protection faults. Those changes were the meat of Excel 2.1c. ChrisP (Chris Peters) also added the 3D look for the row and column headers.

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