of traceability of a user's logic or model structure through its twelve views. Among its dynamically linked views were: diagram, formulas, table, chart, QuickGraph, worksheet, notes, errors, macro and graph. A complex model can be dissected and understood by others who had no role in its creation, and this remains unique even today. The second fundamental advance in Javelins design is extensive built-in time series modeling, including calendar intelligence. Javelin was used primarily for corporate and governmental financial modeling, but was also used to build instructional models in college chemistry courses, to model the world's economies, and by the military early in the "Star Wars" project. It is still in use by institutions for which model integrity is mission critical. Javelin received multiple awards, including "Best of 1985" for technical excellence from PC Magazine, "Most Significant Product" from PC Week and "Software Product of the Year". The Infoworld award apparently created some consternation in the top ranks of number two Microsoft: Javelin was conceived by co-founder Rob Firmin, chairman and CEO, whose University of Chicago doctorate research and subsequent financial planning work at Prime Computer led him to creation of the concepts. His co-founder, Stan Kugell, president, worked with Firmin on the user interface. The Javelin development team was led by Christopher Herot, vice president of engineering, and included Charles Frankston, brother of the spreadsheet co-inventor Bob Frankston, Arye Gittelman, John R. Levine, Louise Cousins (Pathe) and Peter Pathe. Some parts of Javelins approach were later used by other products such as Lotus's Improv. Lotus essentially copied two Javelin features (named data arrays and pivot tables) onto a NeXTSTEP-based and later Windows-based GUI to create Improv. Since Improv was not based on 1980s MS-DOS technology, it suffered less memory-based limitations than Javelin, though Javelin performed well with DOS extended and expanded memory. While its business failure has been attributed to the infancy of business GUI software at the time, as well as an ill-conceived marketing plan that placed it head to head with the popular spreadsheet 1-2-3, enterprise-wide financial models converted into Javelin models at times strained the PC resources of the day. Despite this, it remained a standard for financial modeling and econometrics for several years after it was discontinued by Oracle. For example, the World Bank modeled the world's economies in Javelin and distributed them in Javelin format for a number of years. References External links Original advertisement