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Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

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Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#41

Post by TMWNN »

billygoat wrote: post #22

woohoo, great post, brings back memories. 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 Sup…

> 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.

InfoWorld said in 1986 that SuperCalc 4 competed well with 1-2-3. https://books.google.com/books?id=Zi8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA35> Did you have experience with that version?

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#42

Post by [deleted] »

ChristopherDrum wrote: post #6
smackeyacky wrote: post #3

When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. 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…

Author here. I'm not really sure how I could tackle Lotus Notes, as it requires also setting up a backend Domino server (IIRC). That level of enterprise setup strays from my purpose with the blog, as I'm evaluating the software with an eye toward modern-day usability. Maybe there's a simple way to make use of Notes that I don't know about. When I was manager of a Macintosh network in the early 2000's, we were forced…

[deleted]

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#43

Post by billygoat »

TMWNN wrote: post #41
billygoat wrote: post #22

woohoo, great post, brings back memories. 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 Sup…

> 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. InfoWorld said in 1986 that SuperCalc 4 competed well with 1-2-3. https://books.google.com/books?id=Zi8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA35 > Did you have experience with that version?

At that time I don't think I was using either spreadsheet program at a level where I would have needed advanced features. I remember using both, and looking now at old screenshots of the splash screens, I think we did eventually upgrade to SuperCalc 4, probably because of better 1-2-3 compatibility.

There was a "red carpet area" in the office where the high-ups worked, and I remember they all used 1-2-3 and we had to support them sometimes... But we pions were using SuperCalc. More than that I don't remember, it's just been too long.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#44

Post by muyuu »

smackeyacky wrote: post #3

When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. 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…

Back in 1995-1998 or so, Lotus 1-2-3 was the price of a mid-range computer and Wordperfect was about half that. People were seriously invested in them, in several ways.

I remember resisting myself as a kid the change from DOS to Windows versions of apps. Practically I was more productive with my memorised key combos and found it extremely annoying to switch. I also had an Amiga background that "workbench" and mouse point-and-click interfaces in general were meant for design and authoring applications but not for documents. Coming to think of it, I still feel this way - which perhaps is why I'm so naturally inclined to use stuff like vi(m)/emacs and tiled window managers.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#45

Post by malthaus »

simonjgreen wrote: post #11
smackeyacky wrote: post #3

When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. 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…

It runs out my brain had filed all Lotus Notes experiences away in long term archival and this comment has revived them like a burst damn of both promise and trauma. The only other comparable stack of the era, maybe slightly later, would be MS Access. When you’d get a call from a prospective client who’d explain they had a member of staff leave and now nobody knows how the Access database works. “Accidentally load be…

your trauma is my happy memory - being a lotus notes admin/dev consultant during my studies made me live a very comfortable life as a student!

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#46

Post by mito88 »

gadders wrote: post #27

I used to work for Lotus, supporting 1-2-3. 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 to…

and 10base2....

:)

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#47

Post by robertandrewp »

The "one of the greatest inventions in computing" framing holds up when you look at what it actually did to financial math accessibility.

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.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#48

Post by bombcar »

ChristopherDrum wrote: post #36
sedatk wrote: post #15

That's a beautifully written post. Almost like a book. I love it. Also, it made me notice that how much I missed the artistry of computer magazine ads. There was something magical with the experience of reading a computer magazine that I don't experience on any media anymore. Beautiful ads was part of that experience. How the tables have turned now. That said, DOSBox's TrueType fonts threw me off. It looks great of c…

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. I do try to make the posts more than just "here's what the software did" otherwise someone could just crack open a manual and get the same impact. I flip-flop on using TrueType in DOSBox-X for the blog. I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing in certain corners, and I do appreciate that. But since I'm confined to emulators, I guess I feel like I might as well t…

Does DOSBox allow you to swap between TrueType and "natural" without rebooting the VM? If so you could screenshot both options and have a toggle in the post.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#49

Post by bombcar »

robertandrewp wrote: post #47

The "one of the greatest inventions in computing" framing holds up when you look at what it actually did to financial math accessibility. 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. Wha…

The "non-programmers" part was the earth-shattering change; before that managers had to ask analysts to do the work or setup the program for that particular question; 1-2-3 let them build it out themselves and play with it before showing it to anyone.

Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

#50

Post by PaulHoule »

smackeyacky wrote: post #3

When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. 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…

I did a lot of study of Lotus Notes circa 2015 when I was thinking about a no-/low-code future. It is still ahead of its time when it comes to having a document database that supports merging but it's unthinkable that you'd build a system like that around email today as today an email system is 99% spam filter and 1% other stuff.
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