A look back: As-Easy-As for DOS

Technical writers rely on a variety of tools to get the job done. While we often think of word processors and markup systems for our work, technical writers also leverage spreadsheets to analyze and organize data so they can write about it. Today, you might use Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, or Google Sheets. Turning the clock back to the 1980s and 1990s, you might have used Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, or As-Easy-As.

Created initially as an experiment, As-Easy-As became an invaluable tool to analyze nuclear radiation data from the Chernobyl reactor accident. Released under the then-new “shareware” model, users could try As-Easy-As before buying it; registration was just $69 plus $6 to send you the latest version on floppy disk and a printed manual. This made As-Easy-As very attractive to businesses and individuals alike.

I recently interviewed Paris about TRIUS Inc and As-Easy-As. This was a fascinating look back at how As-Easy-As was developed, including the manual that came with it.

Let’s start with an introduction. Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Paris Karahalios. I have a BS and MS degrees in Nuclear Engineering with an option in Fusion and emphasis on Radiation accident analysis and health consequence modeling. I worked in the nuclear industry for about 10 years before I got into software development and IT around 1988. I started my third career about 10 years ago, when TRIUS stopped operating, as a senior technical project manager. I am currently the VP of Technical Project Management at Spire. I thoroughly enjoy what I do and the group of people I work with. I think of it as a continuous learning game, where I am called to solve new, challenging problems every day.

While in college, I became infatuated with computers and by the time I finished in 1980, I had become fairly proficient in using the CDC Cyber 6400 mainframe at the school. By that time, I had also written a number of programs for the TI-59 programmable calculator with the magnetic cards, which were published in the PPX TI Library and I had written a payroll program for the TI-99/4a computer. (I had to save and load the program each time I used it from a handheld cassette recorder using a regular cassette—no DAT tapes yet.)

This is just a long-winded way of saying that I had become a computer geek early in life, and continue to be one to this date.

You were a co-founder of TRIUS. How did the company start?

In 1984-85, I was working in the Nuclear Division of a large AE firm in Boston (Stone & Webster Engineering Co), where I was spending most of my time on mathematical and computer modeling of nuclear accident consequences, using IBM-360 mainframes.

Personal Computers were becoming popular and the company bought a true blue IBM PC-XT for each of the groups. Real powerful at the time, IBM PC-XT with two double-sided 5.25" floppy drives, 256 KB RAM and a single application: Lotus 1-2-3. We had to sign-up early in the day, or the day before, to reserve time on the shared PC, it was a hot item!

Some of us Stone & Webster employees formed a PC-Users group, where we met once a week, during lunch, and discussed the latest updates to PCs, new software, ideas on how to use PCs in new ways, etc. I met Dave Schulz in one of those meetings and we started hanging around. Dave was a Civil/Piping Engineer working in a different division of the same company, but his fundamental knowledge of computers, computing and software was unmatched! It was as if his brain worked in the decimal system for day-to-day life, and in bits and bytes at a native CPU level when it came to computers. I was impressed with his depth of knowledge and ability to translate theory into computer code then, and for the remaining 28+ years we worked together!

While I was fascinated with the capabilities of Lotus 1-2-3, he had just purchased a copy of Turbo Pascal and was dissecting the rudimentary grid (spreadsheet) sample app that came with it. Pretty soon, he started expanding its capabilities and we started to meet at his desk, discuss and review progress every day. It was still a basic program, but it was continuously improved.

At the time, 9-pin dot matrix printers were becoming inexpensive, but the print quality was lousy. 24-pin printers could generate “letter quality” print, but were very expensive. Dave and I spent time understanding how the printers were driven through the interrupts and wrote a .COM program (written at the command line with the debugger included on the DOS floppy disk). When it ran, it would terminate and stay resident, it would interrupt BIOS calls to the printer and would then take over and manipulate the print head, so that a cheap inexpensive 9-pin printer could print “letter quality” text. We thought we could make some extra (side) money selling the program.

Something not many people know is that Dave and I formed TRIUS so that we could continue developing and marketing the Printer Enhancement program (if I recall correctly, it was less than 80 bytes long). In the meantime, work on the “spreadsheet” program continued. One of Dave’s co-workers had cutely nicknamed it “As-Easy-AS 1-2-3” (a play on “Lotus 1-2-3”). We had reached the point where the program could now read and write Lotus 1-2-3 (.WKS) files—a breakthrough! All while Dave and I were still working for Stone & Webster.

You co-created the As-Easy-As spreadsheet for DOS. How did that come about? Why write a spreadsheet?

On April 26, 1986 the Chernobyl reactor accident took place. Because I had done a lot of research and had published a number of technical papers on Reactor Accident Consequence Analyses, a month or so later the state department selected me to be the US delegate to the first meeting of Group of Experts in Consequence Analyses (GRECA) meeting in Paris France (Russia would not allow us to go to Chernobyl, yet). The meeting was attended by one delegate from each of 62 countries, to discuss the accident, validate mathematical prediction models and advise governments on next actions.

At the end of the meeting, it was decided that all radiation measurements reports for every country (the radioactive plume was travelling around the world) would be sent to me (in the US) where we would validate it, analyze it and use it to possibly determine (a) the level of damage to the Chernobyl reactor core, and (b) movement and depletion of the radioactive plume over the world.

When I came back to the US and the data started arriving on a daily basis, I reserved the group’s PC exclusively each day of the week and realized that we needed additional storage. We purchased two external Bernoulli drives (the original model, using the 8.5"×11", thick, Bernoulli disks, each storing a whopping 5 MB worth of data). We solved the data storage problem. We were using Lotus 1-2-3 to do all the data manipulation, which served us well, but we had a new issue. We needed to generate plots of the tabulated data and the Lotus 1-2-3 graphing capabilities (which were primarily meant for business) could not adequately handle the log/exponential curves we needed to plot needed for radioactivity decay.

Dave and I decided that the way to solve the problem was to spend more time on the development of As-Easy-As and focus on scientific plotting. Once these capabilities were in place (in a matter of a month or so), we started using As-Easy-As for analyzing the Chernobyl data and preparing the reports.

No more printer enhancement software, we now started concentrating on the further development of As-Easy-As.

Do you have any examples of interesting ways that people used As-Easy-As?

There were many customers that had used As-Easy-As for niche applications, it’s hard to remember them all. Here are some that come to mind.

A user wrote a spreadsheet that would get real time stock quotes through a paid service (using a dial-up modem) and then dump the raw data to As-Easy-As for DOS through the serial port. He had come up with algorithms in As-Easy-As to analyze stock prices, identify trends and try to determine good/bad investments. We never followed up to see if they made any money from those investments.

A major West coast fast food chain’s (2000+ locations) corporate Dev team integrated As-Easy-As for DOS into their management system at every location, with a connection to headquarters, to manage daily sales, cost analyses, goals, etc. I was directly involved in that integration and learned a lot about “corporate” software deployment workflows from them.

The Chinese version of As-Easy-As for DOS was incorporated as a mandatory course in the Taiwanese Computer Technical Schools curriculum. Multiple instructional books were written in Chinese (I have copies of some of them). As an aside… As-Easy-As was also translated into Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, German,… We did all the implementations at TRIUS. We’d extract all strings from the code (menus, sub-menus, error messages, function names, etc.), we’d send them to our partners/licensees for the foreign versions, they would translate them and then send them back to us. We would then go back and replace all strings in the source code with the foreign translations. I was primarily responsible for doing all these foreign implementations. The Chinese version presented a problem because Chinese characters need 2 bytes for their representation, so the BIOS, built-for 1-byte ASCII character display, could not accommodate them. Our Chinese partner had to come up with a TSR, partial BIOS replacement that would intercept interrupt calls from the program to remap and display 2-byte characters on the screen. A fun project.

Mazda US headquarters developed an integrated leasing system using As-Easy-As for DOS that was used by every US Mazda dealer.

A special custom version of As-Easy-As, for the HP Palmtop, was used by a hospital group to schedule and manage daily rounds.

A user interfaced As-Easy-As to a CNC table, through the serial port, and used it to drive a cutter to create all sorts of designs based on complex trigonometric equations.

Registered users got a printed manual. How was this written?

I wrote the first manual using PC-Write (another shareware program by a good friend, Bob Wallace). No pictures, no graphics, just ASCII characters. Even the name of As-Easy-As on the front cover was written using the ASCII line characters! I printed it on a HP LaserJet II printer on 8.5"×11" paper, then had it reduced, printed and bound by a local printer. We printed 100 of them in the first run and they were depleted in about a month. The next version was also written in PC-Write and we produced 500 this time, which lasted us about 3 months.

I also wrote the next couple versions of the manuals, this time using WordPerfect and we had cover art designed professionally for us. After that, the manuals were written by a couple of employees, and I would review and approve them. When we ported the program to Windows, I took over writing the manuals again.

What system or word processor did you use to produce the manual?

The early user manuals were written using PC-Write.

We started using WordPerfect with subsequent versions and then moved to Corel and Aldus PageMaker before moving to Microsoft Word.

It was always a balance game. We liked PC-Write because we had absolute control over it (embedded control codes, etc.), but it was not a true word processor, so as the look and feel of the manuals changed, it became harder to get the desired results.

We moved to WordPerfect and liked it for its embedded character mode, where you could see what was happening under the surface (remember, we were all hackers, in the good sense of the word). When layout demands became even more needed, we moved to the other products which were more “publishing apps.”

What was the process to write the first manual?

Well, we have to take things in context. Back in the old days, there used to be at least two or three manuals, a user’s manual, a reference manual and (for hardware) a service manual. Each was laid out differently since they served different purposes. For software, there were two; a user’s manual that took the user step-by-step to achieving certain tasks, and a reference manual that documented what each section of the software did.

In writing the first As-Easy-As manual, I took a hybrid approach. Menus structure in the program already provided the outline of a “Reference Manual” for me, so I started with that, explaining what each menu command did, filling in with some general spreadsheet sections and use cases for the menus, where appropriate.

Writing manuals for subsequent versions of As-Easy-As, and other software products, I used different approaches with my favorite being to indeed write an outline and then follow it to write the manual, while still providing use-cases as examples of solved problems.

What was the editing and publishing process like?

For the first manual, I wrote it, Dave quickly scanned it and that was it. I did go over it a few times for errors, but we wanted to get the information out to the users who were already paying for our product, so we released it, knowing that I’d have to go back and re-do some of the work.

Once we had some employees and we could share the workload, we did have some of them review the manual (even some that had no computer knowledge/experience) and provide feedback on language, and ease-of-understanding. I was so close to the program that whatever I wrote already made sense to me, but I might be the only one it made sense to. These reviewers were instrumental in improving the user manual.

When it got to versions 5.2, 5.7, etc. we employed a small agency to proofread what we wrote, but I have to be honest, I don’t think their contribution was significant. Sure, they may have caught a few grammatical errors, but no substantive contribution.

What was the printing process like? How did you print the manual?

I mentioned that I wrote the first As-Easy-As manual using the PC-Write shareware program, written by Bob Wallace, a friend and the 9th employee of Microsoft. Once it was completed, I printed it on 8.5"×11" paper, single sided, on a LaserJet II printer. I took the printed copy to a local printer, they photo-copied it at 50% size reduction, so they could generate 8.5"×11" double sided spreads, then they cut them in half and perfect bound them with an 80# glossy cover. As you can tell, they spent a bunch of time to lay out the half-size spreads and the final product didn’t look like much. However, it’s hard to describe the pride and euphoria when I picked up 2 boxes of manuals (I believe 50 manuals in each box) and brought them home. It felt as if I had achieved something significant.

We followed the same process for a few of future user manual versions, and then we moved to providing digital files to a larger print house we had started using, who also had in-house Aldus Pagemaker and Corel capabilities that made it a lot easier to accept and lay out the material we gave them.

What did the manual look like?

I have some of the manuals and have attached photos. I may have some earlier ones, as well, somewhere in the basement, but I’ll have to really look for them. I wish I had kept one of the first batch of the manuals we produced.

A couple of versions of the As-Easy-As and Alite (the lighter, TSR version) user manuals

The French version of the manual, published in France by SIR Informatique

The German version, published in Germany by Computer Solutions GmbH

The Spanish version, “Potencia 10”

The Italian version of the manual

Pictures of As-Easy-As books in Chinese that were used in teaching spreadsheets in Taiwan (required course in Computer Technical Institutes). Published by Race International LTD.

What fonts did you use for the manual? What’s your favorite font for print?

Font selection in the early days was not great, in particular within the confines of the PC. If I recall correctly, Times New Roman and Courier were the most common ones with Helvetica starting to gain some ground at the time. I believe I used Helvetica for the first manual, and a mix of fonts later on, including Garamond at some point.

Nowadays, I personally don’t generate a lot of material for print, but I find myself using a couple of fonts more than others. I mostly use the default fonts (Arial, Calibri, Aptos,…). For printed matter readability, I like Times New Roman, but most of the people I know hate it—it’s not one of the modern fonts. I guess that’s personal preference, just like ice cream flavors.

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Thanks to Paris for this excellent look back at As-Easy-As, both the software and the manual! Paris shared more details with us than we could include in this article. Read more in the interview at Coaching Buttons about launching TRIUS Inc and growing the company. Also look for a follow-up interview published by our friends at All Things Open where we look at how As-Easy-As was developed.

Want to see As-Easy-As in action? This brief demonstration shows how to use As-Easy-As to solve for values in a triangle: