Mosaic Software Cambridge MA Chartman, Integrated-7, and The Twin 1-2-3-alike
I'm Arthur Hu and for me the good old days were in the 80s from 1983-1989 when I stumbled on this company peddling a device independent graphics package for MS-BASIC for no money then got offered a salary if I could write a spreadsheet program for the PC like Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Multiplan.
According to wikipedia, I was actually the 2nd Bexley alumni (MIT '80, graduates with 2 degrees in 1981) to do a spreadsheet as the original Visicalc was done by
Dan Bricklin, which in turn was reworked into Lotus 1-2-3 much like a spin-off before the Visi-On debacle. Bexley hall legendary as center of counterculture on campus since the 1960s and 70s and even into the 2010s until it was demolished allegedly due to water structural damage and is now the site of a park which does not bear a memorial.
After the success of 1-2-3, the industry was abuzz with the idea of who would be first to create an integrated software package that did everything. Lotus eventually came up with Symphony. Mosaic had started with the BASIC based Chartman and the idea was to use C to make an integrated package. The result was Integrated-7 which was a spreadsheet with a very basic word processor and database, and the spreadsheet which was based mostly on 1-2-3 with its own file format was adapted to use the published 1-2-3 file format and became The Twin which was one of the first successful PC programs written in C using data abstraction which was taught at MIT in the late 1970s using PL/I before CLU was created.
At the time it was common practice to create programs that emulated other programs at a byte for byte compatibility level as long as you did not actually copy source code, which we didn't do.
The Intel 8086/8088 was the original x86 processor which got around the 16 bit 64k addressing barrier which frequent afflicted minicomputers by adding a 4 bit segment hack which extended addressing to 1 million bytes or 1M memory which was fine for about 4 years. Lotus 1-2-3 which was written in 16 bit assembler with 16 bit pointers which was the most efficient way to to processing. Using Lattice C meant code would be bigger and worse, to simplify things we used Lattice C 32 bit LONG pointer, but it wasn't bad as it was about twice as big and half as fast but usually memory got twice as big and twice as fast if you just waited for next year's PC.
The hardest trick in matching was how they got lightning fast screen repaints because sprintf took FOREVER to paint a screen full of floating point numbers. If you broke down the process manually, the bottleneck was floating point multiply by 10.0 to convert a number into a long decimal integer.
The hack I figured out was to take the fraction and exponent out of the IEEE floating point to get a binary number, then use a shift and add (mult by 2 and add 1) to multiply by five and shift again which gives you ten, and then stick it back into the fraction and exponent add or subtract an exponent or two, and we got times similar to 1-2-3. This could all be done in C. The only assembler was to do the rpn push and pop for expression evaluation of tokens, and later to interface to Intel
I was so inspired by your story, that I recovered i7 from my ancient 701C butterfly laptop and created an Integrated 7 museum. Find it at:
Send us a picture with your retro system running i7, I can add it to the museum.
Enjoy!
Welcome to the Integrated 7 (i7) Museum
Integrated 7 was a multipurpose spreadsheet/wordprocessing/database/communication, etc. etc. program that included many of (seven of them) the most commonly needed applications on a personal computer.
This program also contained the very first implementation of the Helvetica font which can be accessed by specifying Font =3 in the Graph Options menu.
This program was created in 1988 and I consider it abandonware. If anyone has any objections I will remove it, but for now, get it here.
This is a zip file, just unzip it to a directory like c:\i7
This can be run in a modern operating system if you use DosBox
After you start it, you can use the command
mount x: c:/i7
This will mount the x drive to where you unzipped i7.
Then just switch to the x: drive and run i7:
x:
i7
I have verified that if you change the configuration file (Use the menu to access Options/DosBox .74 Options)
machine = hercules
Then start i7 with the i7h.bat file, you can run it in high resolution black/white Hercules graphics card mode, so you can see that nice Helvetica font in all its glory.
-Thanks for dropping by, enjoy
I got this letter from my brother Franklin who was also there:
my e-mail is arthur no-space 98021 at gmail
From: Elmer Robinson elmerrobinson at yahoo
Date: May 1, 2017 at 5:35:12 PM PDT
To: "franklinhu at yahoo
Subject: The Twin and Integrated 7
Mr. Hu,
I apologize for reaching out to you uninvited like this. I came across your resume while I was searching for the Twin and Integrated 7.
I am a 30+ year computer network engineer and security consultant, and my career in computers was launched in part because of my time with these two applications. The first computer I bought in 1986 I purchased with two 5 1/4" floppy drives and a copy of The Twin. What I could do with that program on that old machine was simply magic to me, and made me fall in love with computers. I had an experience where I found a bug in the Twin while I was working with it, called Mosaic's help line, spoke with someone who knew exactly what I was talking about and sent me out an update disk right away. From that point on I was hooked.
I'm reaching out to you because I've been bitten by the nostalgia bug, and I've been trying my best to re-create my first computer system. The only physical thing I need to find at this point are copies of The Twin, and Integrated 7. I have found internet archives with running copies of the Twin, but nothing is out there for I7. After years of searching I found an incomplete set of I7 disks and manuals, but the Library, Terminal and Help disks are missing preventing an full install.
So this is a wild, crazy shot in the dark to see if you have any idea where I could find copies of these programs that I love so much?
If nothing else, I wanted to tell you how much your work meant to me personally, and to thank you for your part in that.
Sincerely,
Elmer Robinson
It's really a pleasure to meet you both. I always thought the Twin was a great product that was better and cheaper than 123. It's too bad Lotus decided to sue the competition, rather than innovate and improve their product like they should have done. Especially since they just copied VisiCalc.
As I mentioned, I consider it the program that got me hooked on computers and I have a real soft spot for it.
I appreciate you keeping me in mind if you find something Twin or I7 related that you could part with. I'd be happy to pay what you think it's worth.
