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Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

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Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#101

Post by skissane »

userbinator wrote: post #83
rasz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've already written a generic VESA framebuffer you mean like this https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm ?

I was actually inspired by that one, but it has some glaring deficiencies (like windowed DOS boxes corrupting the graphics state) that I wanted to fix; but only managed to do so, partially, before other things took priority. The amount of code needed to get basic unaccelerated graphics working is surprisingly small; most of it has to do with detection and modeswitching. Once you set the mode, all you need to do is gi…

Any chance you might open source the generic VESA framebuffer you wrote? It would be interesting to read the code.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#102

Post by pjmlp »

skissane wrote: post #75
bombcar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

Which is why I keep all the PDFs of the RedBooks I care about.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#103

Post by LocalH »

skissane wrote: post #75
bombcar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

So basically we need to archive the Lotus FTP site now, before they pull an Intel

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#104

Post by adwww »

brassattax wrote: post #73
bombcar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And your contacts would be split between 19 different chat applications...

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#105

Post by jgtrosh »

tombert wrote: post #82

I think there is something kind of fun about purposefully using "outdated" software, and even valuable sometimes, in the same way that it's useful to use a dead language like Latin nowadays; it's not changing so there's sort of a bit of "equality" to it, for want of a better word. For example, I've actually thought it might make sense for people to release new software on DOS or the Sega Genesis, simply because they'…

http://morphcat.de/micromages/ here's a fun example of a great game recently released for the NES

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#106

Post by eek04_ »

throwawayboise wrote: post #74
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #39

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...

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), SCO Unix (1994), and macOS (2001).

Excel was originally a Mac program, but hasn't been available on any Unix platform since (as far as I can tell.)

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#107

Post by zenexer »

aasasd wrote: post #93

Patience exhibited by the author is incredible. These days I get angry after maybe an hour or two of running into one issue after another—because I know that their supply is pretty much endless, while victories over unreasonable software begin to feel smaller and rather meh.

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

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#108

Post by not_knuth »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #98
tombert wrote: post #82

I think there is something kind of fun about purposefully using "outdated" software, and even valuable sometimes, in the same way that it's useful to use a dead language like Latin nowadays; it's not changing so there's sort of a bit of "equality" to it, for want of a better word. For example, I've actually thought it might make sense for people to release new software on DOS or the Sega Genesis, simply because they'…

> in the same way that it's useful to use a dead language like Latin nowadays; it's not changing so there's sort of a bit of "equality" to it, for want of a better word. You might think so, but reading scholastic Latin from the 1700s is radically different from reading classical Latin from the -100s. Cicero was writing in his own native language, and he used the wordings that came to him. Isaac Newton was also, kind…

That sounds rather plausible and interesting. Does this Wikipedia article [0] cover the topic well or are there some hidden treasures buried by SEO?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Latin

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#109

Post by aasasd »

zenexer wrote: post #107
aasasd wrote: post #93

Patience exhibited by the author is incredible. These days I get angry after maybe an hour or two of running into one issue after another—because I know that their supply is pretty much endless, while victories over unreasonable software begin to feel smaller and rather meh.

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

Yeah, I'm vaguely familiar with taviso's credentials—but there's security research and then there's digging out symbols to write a display driver for DOS Lotus 1-2-3. I'm saying that as someone who spends inordinate amounts of time trying to get emulators to run old games on my Mac; whacking my config into just the right shape; and using Lua instead of Python because scripts finish faster than Python starts up.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution

#110

Post by syoc »

zenexer wrote: post #107
aasasd wrote: post #93

Patience exhibited by the author is incredible. These days I get angry after maybe an hour or two of running into one issue after another—because I know that their supply is pretty much endless, while victories over unreasonable software begin to feel smaller and rather meh.

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.
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