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Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

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Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#71

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #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 exp…

Hehe, this is Tavis (from Project Zero), so he might know a bit about security.

Dopamine hits are probably a large determining factor of what kind of programmer you are. Making something from scratch has a longer glow, and a fulfilling crescendo, but nothing compares with the joy of finding the right thing to whisper to a machine to get it to do something it was never meant to. Whether it be displaying DOS interfaces in wide screen or dumping its memory. The pain of looking for the right combination only makes finding it sweeter.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#72

Post by brassattax »

technofiend wrote: post #68
lykr0n wrote: post #10

Stuff like this is so cool, and also highlights the importance of archiving the internet. I've never used Lotus 1-2-3, but this makes me want to try and get it running to try out older software that is brutally efficient.

Lotus 123's slash commands were extremely handy. To the point where Microsoft was forced to copy them when Excel first came out to ease transition of users. There's a ton of older references on the web on how to use them. See https://www.isric.org/sites/default/files/isric_report_1990_... for a reproduction of 123's main menus. The sequences become muscle memory really fast.

Huh. First time I've ever seen "@" referred to as the "monkeytail sign" (pg 15)

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#73

Post by brassattax »

bombcar wrote: post #55
tyingq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Can't believe the Lotus FTP site is still live. Wonder where that thing is running" Had me curious as well. $ host ftp.support.lotus.com ftp.support.lotus.com is an alias for service.boulder.ibm.com. service.boulder.ibm.com has address 170.225.15.26 It's running WUFTPD 2.6.3, which is abandonware as far as I can tell. Though no open vulnerabilities listed.

Nobody at IBM will ever want to be the person to suggest decommissioning a server that might make a paying customer yell at their manager. Expect it to continue forever.

If only Google were like IBM we'd still have Reader.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#74

Post by throwawayboise »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #39
mixmastamyk wrote: post #26

Fascinating, I was a kid but just old enough to remember trying out this kind of DOS software and reading Norton's book as well. However, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a "modern" terminal floss office suite. There are a number of projects, but they are scattered: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/115548

However, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a "modern" terminal floss office suite. Lotus is not is not open source. You would need to get IBM to release it as open source, which of course means they would have to have the code stored somewhere. While we're at it we can get microsoft to release the dos versions of works and visual basic, and whoever owns wordperfect to release that.

Wordperfect at least existed for Unix platforms so might be somewhat portable to linux. I don't remember Lotus or Microsoft ever being on Unix back in the day. Though Lotus did have Improv on the NeXT so maybe they did...

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#75

Post by skissane »

bombcar wrote: post #55
tyingq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Can't believe the Lotus FTP site is still live. Wonder where that thing is running" Had me curious as well. $ host ftp.support.lotus.com ftp.support.lotus.com is an alias for service.boulder.ibm.com. service.boulder.ibm.com has address 170.225.15.26 It's running WUFTPD 2.6.3, which is abandonware as far as I can tell. Though no open vulnerabilities listed.

Nobody at IBM will ever want to be the person to suggest decommissioning a server that might make a paying customer yell at their manager. Expect it to continue forever.

Back in mid-2019, IBM took down their old IBM Library Server mainframe documentation website – http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/library – it was absolutely fascinating, it had documentation on mainframe products going back to the 1990s, and even other random stuff like a bunch of obscure IBM software packages for OS/2. Their new mainframe documentation site only has recent releases on it, it is missing all the old stuff.

So given that example, I doubt this is going to continue forever either. Sooner or later someone is going to say "FTP is a security risk, we need to replace it with SFTP". And then the old FTP site will disappear and be replaced with a new SFTP site with far less content. Or the hardware it is running on will fail and be too old to be replaced. Or someone will complain the OS or FTP server software are out of support and that makes them a security risk. The whole thing is only an audit away from oblivion.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#76

Post by aendruk »

brassattax wrote: post #72
technofiend wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lotus 123's slash commands were extremely handy. To the point where Microsoft was forced to copy them when Excel first came out to ease transition of users. There's a ton of older references on the web on how to use them. See https://www.isric.org/sites/default/files/isric_report_1990_... for a reproduction of 123's main menus. The sequences become muscle memory really fast.

Huh. First time I've ever seen "@" referred to as the "monkeytail sign" (pg 15)

Globally it has a variety of often charming interpretations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Names_in_other_languag...

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#77

Post by roelschroeven »

brassattax wrote: post #72
technofiend wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lotus 123's slash commands were extremely handy. To the point where Microsoft was forced to copy them when Excel first came out to ease transition of users. There's a ton of older references on the web on how to use them. See https://www.isric.org/sites/default/files/isric_report_1990_... for a reproduction of 123's main menus. The sequences become muscle memory really fast.

Huh. First time I've ever seen "@" referred to as the "monkeytail sign" (pg 15)

In English seeing it referred to as "monkeytail" looks weird, but in my native language Dutch it's often referred to as "apenstaart" or "apenstaartje" which means "monkeytail" resp. "little monkeytail". Though more and more often it's referred to as the English "at".

(Which, as I come to notice now, is almost exactly what the Wikipedia article in the sibling comment says)

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#79

Post by EvanAnderson »

schnable wrote: post #60
EvanAnderson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's linked in the post: ftp://ftp.support.lotus.com/pub/ The Internet Archive has a copy too: https://archive.org/details/2008-12-23_ftp.support.lotus.com

He mentioned another one as well.

Heh heh. Poor reading skills on my part.

The Cirrus Logic VGA drivers might have come from here: http://ftp.mpoli.fi/pub/pub/unpacked/hardware/display/cirrus...

The HighPrint driver I'm less sure about.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#80

Post by mmastrac »

sneak wrote: post #54

This is awesome. Could a js transpilation of a dos emulator be used to get this to run well in a browser? It would be cool to have a text mode spreadsheet that works in a browser and could be self hosted.

Probably. archive.org has a wasm build of DOSBox that works reasonably well.
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