Sharp Tools was originally developed as a Software Engineering course project by five Columbia CS students: Hua Zhong, Ricky Chin, Daniel Goldberg, Daniel Medina and Andrei Scudder.
Hua Zhong was the team leader. He designed the whole architecture, finished the most technical part of code (most importantly the Formula class, and also Undo/Redo, Histogram, Data exchange with Excel, etc), and implemented many "interesting" features. Ricky wrote the table model class, clipboard and table operations. Daniel Goldberg wrote the first version of GUI, file operations and printing support. Daniel Medina prepared the documentation and added a nice built-in browser. Andrei implemented several dialogs.
The first version of Sharp Tools spreadsheet came out at the beginning of December 2000. From then on, nobody worked on it for several months. However, in May 2001, Hua decided to put the code under GPL and publicize to the Internet community. "The quality of code is good, and we should let people know about it." So it was put on freshmeat and then sourceforge, and Hua became the only maintainer. Since then, he has been constantly improving the code.