Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

That said, DOSBox's TrueType fonts threw me off. It looks great of course, but it's similar to listening to Synthwave: there are some familiar elements from the era it represents, but it still feels alien.

I first learned about spreadsheets on a TV show in Turkey[1] that I believed demoed Lotus 1-2-3, and my 10 year old mind was blown! What an elegant, unique, and flexible way to model computation! We take spreadsheets for granted today, but I think it's one of the greatest inventions in computing history.

[1] https://youtu.be/tq7auBjEIU4?si=ByTvm2bIT_Dpklqz&t=1451

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

and as stated there

    The only thing that made it look reasonable was 
    that it looked great compared to Lotus macros, 
    which were nothing more than a sequence of 
    keystrokes entered as a long string into a 
    worksheet cell.

Information density, no decorative UI elements distracting you from the content, and keyboard navigability.

Mucking around with autoexec.bat, config.sys, emm386 etc to get 1-2-3 to load was fun. Lots of TSRs using up memory. The amount of times I had to tell people to create a "clean config" by commenting out most of autoexec.bat...

We also had to post people floppy disks with the correct printer driver on. No downloads in those days.

"What would a piece of software have to do today to make you cheer and applaud upon seeing a demo?"

I was at LotusSphere when Lotus Notes 4 was announced and demo-ed. That got a standing ovation.

If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter for dead rather than look at Word.

Lotus users were just as fanatical. It’s probably lost to the mists of time but Lotus could be had for Sun workstations and some users who hit the limit of MS-DOS with Lotus switched to that. It was nuts the things people built with that: prop trading in Lotus on a Sun? Why not.

I’d like to see this blogger do Lotus Notes but I suspect unless you’d actually seen the crazy that Notes developers went to you wouldn’t really understand why it elicited audible groans from pre sales staff when they heard the client was a big Notes user but “was running into problems”.

1-2-3 was damn cool though, Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.

My first internship when I was 19 and still in college (well, failing out at that point but that's another story...) was at a small consulting company where every desk had a 286 clone running MS-DOS 3.3.

We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and SuperCalc didn't? But 1-2-3 was clearly better.

I had to train the older staff members on how to use a mouse. One person thought you had to reboot the computer if the mouse cursor wouldn't go far enough in one direction without reaching the end of your physical desk area -- they didn't know you could Lift The Mouse Off The Desk to move the physical mouse to a better location without moving the cursor. It is truly hard to explain just how newfangled all this technology was back then in a small office.

A big breakthrough for us was switching from dBase to "Clipper" which was basically dBase on the backend but with the ability to write text-mode UI code, so you could build nice purpose-built data-centric applications for clients.

There was a LOT of data entry, digitizing the stops and routes of city transit maps into dBase and these DOS spreadsheets. The keyboard shortcuts were SO FAST and when we eventually moved to Windows 3 in 1991, I always enabled the 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts in Excel. I still remember some of them.

I imagine there's nothing unique about my experience: these types of tasks were surely replicated all over the business world, with interns and staff getting their first taste of spreadsheets and programming languages in these powerful, tiny DOS programs.

I'll skip our brief foray into the dead end that was OS/2 2.0 :-)

I've been implementing the functions Lotus 1-2-3 made mainstream as a REST API — amortization, NPV, IRR, compound interest — and the formulas are completely unchanged from 1983. Forty years of software evolution and the computation at the bottom has been stable the entire time.

What changed is only the interface layer: mainframe COBOL → Lotus cells → Excel formulas → Python libraries → REST endpoints. The spreadsheet era was the step that made financial math legible to non-programmers. Everything since has just been a different packaging of the same numbers.

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html

Might be interesting to others interested in 1-2-3.

My father was a power user of Lotus back in the late 80's. He extensively used it as his job at GE. When we moved back to Pakistan, he setup a girls school and tracked everything from students to accounting to results in Lotus. In many ways, Lotus showed him the power of computers and made him buy a home computer when hardly anyone I knew had it.

Late in his life the world moved onto Excel and reluctantly he had to do it too but his love for Lotus never went away.

I wish I had the tenacity to do more than read 1/3 of it and skim the rest. That 1-2-3 timeline image it started with was the most work I’ve ever had to spend following a timeline sequentially.

The memories. Amazing.

LLMs- write like this. WRITE LIKE THIS!

Finally a leet code application I recognize

One of my jobs was making bootleg copies so everybody could have a copy, until the NY office was busted and they paid out enough to incentivize them to buy copies as needed.

I consider this period of time to be a watershed moment for humanity: prior to this, a lot of business was run on notions and assumptions. With powerful spreadsheets and macros businesses could play "what if" and turn the whole affair into a profit/loss scenario (including labor, e.g., people) and think of businesses simply as a pile of numbers where they only care about maximizing the bottom line.