Live data from Hacker News

Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

lock.cmpxchg8b.com

41–50 of 130 posts

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#41
post #8
post #3

A bit off topic, but what I've wanted forever and never found is a spreadsheet that deals in units natively. So if one cell is in Newtons and I divide it by a cell that is in m/s^2 I want the resulting cell to be in grams. Units should propagate through the sheet automatically. Unit prefixes can either be automatic (km, m, mm, um, etc) or fixed as you would with a format setting. Google calculator is the closest thin…

Or a programming language? Or a Python module?

Somebody already referenced F# elsewhere in the thread: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe.... It will apply unit of measure checks as part of their static type checking.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in any browser, and it,s a capable, usable, beautiful browser.

Do you test on IE for Mac too, not every browser['s rendering] is beautiful to me! Tbh though, back in the day, I used to love jumping through all the hoops to get the idiot cousins in the browsing world rendering a webpage well.

I don't have an extensive Mac IE testing stable yet, but I have tested in IE5 Mac, which has its own rendering engine called Tasman.

However, with every browser I add support for it becomes more and more likely that another one I try will also work, especially if it came later. Netscape 2.0 works, so that covers a good range.

Pre-Mosaic, I have not done much testing yet, in part because it's difficult to find them.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#43

This is freaking awesome! I mostly stick to GUI era software, and find Word 97 to be amazing for writing. I run it inside a VM rather than using Wine.

Word 2003 is mostly the same (last version without ribbon) and has an update available to let it read/write OOXML docs.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#44
It takes a certain kind of puzzle curiosity to do this sort of thing. I find I would have re-written Lotus 1-2-3 from scratch rather than do all this but that is just another way of spending one's "cleverness beans" as they used to say.

People with this level of curiosity and puzzle affinity make great security researchers/staff. In their own way older binaries are all puzzle boxes that are holding some number of exploitable vulnerabilities to make them do things that their original developer either didn't intend or didn't foresee. Finding them gives a dopamine hit.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in any browser, and it,s a capable, usable, beautiful browser.

Do you test on IE for Mac too, not every browser['s rendering] is beautiful to me! Tbh though, back in the day, I used to love jumping through all the hoops to get the idiot cousins in the browsing world rendering a webpage well.

IE3 gave me a bit of a challenge because it likes cookies to only be set a certain way, JUST SO.

However, the most adjustment was probably for Mosaic, who treats ">", not "-->" as HTML comment closing, so my JavaScript can't have > characters. For if statements, I flip them, and anytime I need a > character, I get it from the char value. (Almost all my JS is baked into the HTML by the templating engine, because some browsers don't like/support external includes.)

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#46

I'm obsessed with that Siemens HighPrint 7400 manual cover.

When I was a kid, looking at all the photos in the Macintosh manual of the very 80s office setups made for some serious techno-lust material. It’s funny to look back at it all now, but it was often a combination of hardware that’d cost something pike $20k or more in 2021 dollars!

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#47
This reminds me I should try to make a bit more progress with trying to write an RDP display driver for Win9x... one of those things I thought of one day but never really got around to doing. (I'm sure there are existing solutions, but writing my own is half the fun --- and I've already written a generic VESA framebuffer.)

I like stuff like this in the same ways as car modding --- teaching an old dog new tricks.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#48
Reminds me of the HP 200LX that came with full version of Lotus 1-2-3 v2.4. Quite a powerful computer to run off of two AA batteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX

I still feel there's things it could do that I can't do with my iPhone; and spreadsheets is one of them. (Yes you can get Excel on an iPhone, the interface sucks).

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#49
You should try to find SCO Professional.. It was a 1-2-3 clone for UNIX/Xenix that I think used curses or at least termcap. It worked quite well in an SCO Xenix-based office I maintained in the early 90s.

So this was a single 386 machine with a large card that supported multiple hercules graphics card eqivalents as daughter boards. Terminals included a keyboard and monitor connected to this card over RS-485. A single 386 supported four users this way.

Here is an ad for it:

https://books.google.com/books?id=LVCsAZClkfUC&pg=PT453&lpg=...

It ran SCO Professional, Real World Accounting and a custom database. There was no TCP/IP.

This system replaced the previous Radio Shack model 16-based system. That one ran RM/COS and had several serial port terminals.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#50
post #48

Reminds me of the HP 200LX that came with full version of Lotus 1-2-3 v2.4. Quite a powerful computer to run off of two AA batteries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX I still feel there's things it could do that I can't do with my iPhone; and spreadsheets is one of them. (Yes you can get Excel on an iPhone, the interface sucks).

I had one of these in college! I hooked it up to a serial port and set up Linux to use it as a login terminal, so I could do email in Pine while my girlfriend worked on homework with the actual keyboard/mouse/monitor.

It didn’t just have Lotus; it had a dedicated Lotus key.

Post reply on HN