-- P & L SYSTEMS ACQUIRES MESA FOR NeXTSTEP --

MAY 29th, 1996 -- AMERSHAM, UK -- P & L Systems today announced that it had acquired Athena Design's Mesa for NeXTSTEP, the leading spreadsheet for the NeXTSTEP object-oriented environment. Mesa is a highly functional and fast traditional spreadsheet for NeXTSTEP with 1-2-3 and Excel interoperability, and provides a powerful API used by many of its extensive customer base. Mesa is used at Chrysler, Swiss Bank and Bozell, as well as many other NeXTSTEP sites.

"Acquiring Mesa was a logical step for us," said Paul Lynch, Managing Director of P & L Systems. "We have worked closely with Athena from the start developing companion products for Mesa, and acting as their European distributor. Mesa offers us opportunities for closer interoperation with our existing real-time data distribution products. Existing users will continue to enjoy a high level of support and assistance from us, and we are actively working towards a new release for later this year."

"P & L Systems has been a great partner over the past four years. They will give Mesa and its customers better support and a brighter upgrade path than Athena Design has been able to," says David Pollak, President of Athena Design. "Current and future Mesa users will benefit greatly from the quality that P & L Systems will dedicate to Mesa."

P & L Systems will continue to provide customer service and upgrades for existing customers. Current customers can request support by sending email to mesa@plsys.co.uk, fax to +44 1494 432478, or phoning +44 1494 432422. Mesa will continue to be available from your favourite NeXTSTEP reseller, or directly from P & L Systems.

Mesa for NeXTSTEP is a traditional spreadsheet that is a powerful tool for analysing your data. Mesa, the best-selling NeXTSTEP spreadsheet, won the 1993 NeXTWORLD Magazine "Best-of-Breed" award for financial modelling. Quad-fat, Mesa runs on NEXTSTEP for Motorola, Intel, HP-PA RISC and SPARC architectures.

MOLI[TM]- Mesa Object Library Interface and Mesa's Palletised Objects make it easy for your mission critical custom applications to access the full functionality of the Mesa spreadsheet. MOLI is an object-oriented application program interface that allows custom applications to leverage the power of your Mesa spreadsheet.
Mesa accepts real-time feeds that update your data moment-by-moment, based on changes in the stock market, medical instruments or telephone/data switches.
Execute SQL database queries from your worksheet to select, insert, delete and update SQL databases.
MScript[TM] - Mesa's easy-to-learn scripting language - lets you automate repeated activities.
SmartFill[TM] automatically generates logical sequences of numbers, dates, days, etc.
Formula Inheritance[TM] makes building and maintaining worksheets faster and easier. Enter a formula in one call of the worksheet, and use it again in any cell. All referenced cells will update automatically upon change and recalculation without time-consuming copy and paste.
Easily place spreadsheet ranges and graphs into presentation quality reports using the Visual Report Builder.
Graphing capabilities allow you to effectively communicate the meaning of your data in 2D and 3D graphs.
Drag and Drop fonts, colours, and patterns onto ranges and graphs for direct manipulation on screen. Drag & Drop command icons anywhere on a sheet.
Mesa supports live links to other NeXTSTEP applications for instant recalculation in other documents.
Mesa features file compatibility with Lotus[TM] 1-2-3, Excel[TM] 3.0 and 4.0, SYLK, and of course, delimited text.

P & L Systems is the leading supplier of products and services for NeXTSTEP in the UK. With a complete range of software and hardware products and services, P & L Systems offer full support for customers in the aggressive and sometimes bewildering world of object oriented solutions. Products developed by P & L Systems include the Oracle Adaptor for Mesa; the QuickBase Adaptor for Mesa; Pager, a flexible application for pagers and beepers; PassKey, a password management tool for administrators; AppManager, a software usage monitoring and license allocation utility; and Informant!, a radical new real-time data feed distribution application for Reuters and other feeds on NeXTSTEP, Solaris and Windows NT.

For additional information about P & L Systems and its products and services, contact the company directly at +44 1494 432422, send electronic mail to info@plsys.co.uk, or visit P & L Systems' World Wide Web pages at http://www.plsys.co.uk/.

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P & L Systems, AppManager, PassKey, and Informant! are trademarks for P & L Systems. Mesa is a trademark of Athena Design. NEXTSTEP is a registered trademark of NeXT Computer, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.