Live data from Hacker News

Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

lock.cmpxchg8b.com

121–130 of 130 posts

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

Why would they bother lowering how much content is there? I don't understand people. It's completely orthogonal whether it's on sftp or ftp or https

[deleted]

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#122
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 still use one of these to store my passwords and run certain ancient astronomy software. Today, we don't have any decent small computers which run of AA's.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#123

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

- Wordgrinder/groff+mom+jstar as word processors. Well, the second is not a "word processor" as today, but the syntax is dumbed down from groff with the Mom macros to write up something complex without getting mad with the troff/nfroff syntax. And, yes, you can use eqn(1)/pic(1)/tbl(1)/grap(1) and chem(1) on it in the exact same way.

- scm-im + gnuplot with the dumb display for term

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#124
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer application. It was the reason for many people for buying a computer.

A PC was not fully IBM compatible unless it could run Lotus 1-2-3.

Basically, if it could run the IBM PC versions of Lotus and Flight Simulator, it was deemed "100% IBM compatible".

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#125
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

From the article: > Lotus 1-2-3 was ported to a bunch of systems, including OpenVMS, Xenix, and even System/390. In 1991, Lotus released a version for SunOS4 on SPARC. Word (according to Wikipedia): > ... were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS (1985), AT&T UNIX PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989), SC…

And Mac wasn't a Unix back then.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#126
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s a fairly accomplished security researcher who seems to have quite a knack for this sort of reverse engineering.[0]. I’m always amazed by his patience every time he publishes his research. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavis_Ormandy

"Fairly accomplished" is quite the understatement. I don't know anyone doing better work than Travis and I've not seen anyone saying otherwise either.

Indeed, it is. I didn’t want to sound like a fanboy, but damn, his work is amazing. I don’t know how he has the patience and dedication for half the work he does. And that’s not even to mention the quality of his write-ups.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#127

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…

Hercules. Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

WordPerfect ran natively on x86 xNix.

I installed the SCO Xenix 386 version for several customers. This was a port of the text-mode codebase, roughly equivalent to WordPerfect 5 for DOS. (Generally regarded by WP cognoscenti as the best version: either 4.2 or 5.1 depending who you ask.) WordPerfect's legendarily rich printer support really came into its own for Xenix, which was poor on printer support.

WordPerfect for Linux made it to version 8, and was bundled with Corel LinuxOS, the first desktop distro to boast a graphical display-settings dialog, for instance. It was based on Debian with a heavily-modified version of KDE to make it more Windows-like.

There were free versions of Corel LinuxOS which have a free and slightly cut-down version of WordPerfect, and a paid version with a full unlimited WordPerfect. I own a boxed copy.

I have WordPerfect 8.1 running on Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit. There is no antialiasing, so it looks rather ugly, but it's blazingly fast.

It used to be a major pain to install, but there are new scripts as of last year to simplify it: http://www.xwp8users.com/

I am not aware of a native text-mode version of WordPerfect for Linux, but WordPerfect 6 for DOS (the final DOS version) runs very well under DOSemu.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#130

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…

PC-MOS/386 is FOSS now, but nobody seems to be interested.

https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501

TBH it was a 2nd string product in its prime, IME. DR's Concurrent DOS/386 was the premium offering. I supported it in the late 1980s.

This was around the time that a LAN of cheap PC-XT clones was becoming price-competitive with a big high-power 80386DX machine with lots of RAM and a bunch of dumb terminals on a multiport serial card.

The terminal vendors and multiuser OS vendors fought back with colour terminals and then graphical terminals. CDOS386 supported these. The basic PC design supported 4 RS-232 ports, so you could have an 8MB 386DX with one user on the system console and four users on dumb terminals, all of them able to run even quite demanding DOS apps including fancy stuff like graphical print-preview or a spreadsheet that could draw graphs.

The snag was that CDOS386 was not a DOS; it was a descendant of Concurrent CP/M. It ran DOS apps but could not use DOS drivers – it needed its own. So adding hardware was not a trivial exercise. Kit had to be chosen from short hardware compatibility list (and was therefore expensive) and drivers supplied as object files relinked with the kernel. It was not as simple as modifying CONFIG.SYS and rebooting – PC/MS-DOS sysadmin skills did not transfer over.

And it couldn't usefully run Windows. So as soon as Windows 3 came out in 1990 and the market started to move to Windows and Windows apps, that was largely it for Concurrent DOS, PC-MOS etc.

When DR was bought out by Novell, several forks of the codebase were continued for a while by OEM licencees, and it gained support for FAT32, USB and so on.

A branch of the CDOS codebase is still just about alive though. DR did a 286 version, but were screwed over by Intel. CDOS286 used a feature of prototype 80286 chips to multitask DOS apps, but this was removed in the final shipping CPU hardware. (Intel did not know and put it back but it was too late.)

DR just took the OS in a different direction and sold it as a multitasking real-time OS instead, downplaying DOS compatibility. It bundled a multitasking version of its GEM desktop, too, so it was a multitasking GUI RTOS, called DR-FlexOS.

This found a niche in electronic point-of-sale systems: EPOS, i.e. smart cash registers built around x86 PCs. It was later acquired by IBM who rebranded it as IBM 4680 OS, later IBM 4690 OS. (What a knack for snappy names Big Blue has!)

IBM discontinued it just a few years ago, but it is still sold by Toshiba.

Post reply on HN