Javelin? financial outliner

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 529

Posted by pwolff
2000-05-07 16:42:00

Does anyone remember a financial modeling program called Javelin? Around 1985-1986. Went up against Multiplan and SuperCalc. Brilliant and based on outlining.

The premise: a spreadsheet is really just one form of a simulation or model of economic activity. Another, possibly superior way, of doing this was to actually name your variables and diagram the relationships among them. It presented multiple views of the model and let you manipulate the model through them.

There was a box and arrow view we’d now call an entity-relationship view.

There was a spreadsheet view as a sop to all those Multiplan and SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 users.

And there was an outliner.

The multiple views let you navigate incredibly complex models the way you wanted to. Some parts were clearly hierarchical and globular (outlining), others were tabular and linear (spreadsheet), and some were maze-like, arcane, tangential (the network view).

So… It’s called Javelin. If anyone knows what happened to it please pass the word.

- phil

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