Lotus sold for 1.8B in 2018?
Yeah I was surprised by that, I thought it was still part of IBM.
Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
71–76 of 76 posts
Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
#72That'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…
> I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing
A sibling comment mentioned that TrueType fonts resembled old made-up screenshots, so it might hit a different retrocomputing purity in that sense. :) I wouldn't worry too much about it.
> Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?
They call it "Çizelge" (pronounced "chi-zelle-geh") on the TV show. It's just Turkish translation of "spreadsheet" so, they probably use that name to avoid advertising the brand. I checked out the screenshots, it doesn't look like 1-2-3 or VisiCalc, so, Multiplan maybe? I couldn't find any Multiplan screenshots that looks exactly like it though, but it also has a command bar below the sheet. On top left, it says the Turkish translation of "BUFFER" which also seems characteristic feature of the app, but I couldn't find an exact match. On top right, it says "OTOHESAP" which means "AUTOCALC" which might be a clue perhaps?
I don't recall any Turkish spreadsheet software from the era, so I guess that must be one of those.
Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the menus. Autodesk Animator from 1989 also has menus where the first letter is always unique. Also buttons and some other UI elements. I did not remember that UI convention from back in the day, but when I experienced it recently it made me sad modern GUI applications are never that well designed. Maybe it used to be common?
Software designed before the mouse could be assumed (which was surprisingly late on the PC side; Windows before 95 didn't assume it at all) always had well-thought out keyboard shortcuts (some going so far as to have a printed piece of plastic you'd lay over the function keys or the entire keyboard).
Animator pretty much required a mouse or tablet though and it was released late enough (1989) for PC mice to be common and certainly something someone would buy to use software like that. There is support for moving the mouse pointer using the arrow keys, but I can't imagine many were drawing much like that.
Keyboard overlays were probably even more common in the 1980's. The F-keys make a lot more sense when there is an overlay for the application you use. Memorizing what each Fn is for is no fun unless each key somehow map to something related to the number n.
Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
CompuServ was used more for corporate software downloads in those days than a BBS. Companies generally don't want to rely on some random person with an extra phone line in the basement for product support; CompuServ was 'corporate BBS' and owned by H&R Block, so had biz cred. Driver downloads were pretty much the reason I had a CompuServ account, since we had a bunch of otherwise great local BBS for the other on-line…
> ... some random person with an extra phone line ... True. I was thinking of Ashton-Tate's IT operating an "official" BBS system. OTOH, A-T might have gotten an extremely good deal from CompuServ, due to the cred they'd have brought it.
Oh sure...some companies had their own setup. I think one of the disk drive manufacturers had their own BBS (Western Digital?). But I think most companies looking into this kind of service saw the Compuserv infrastructure (in particular, all the ways to access it...dial, X.25, leased line, etc., with huge numbers of local PoPs) and said "I'll take that because building ourselves it would suck".
And...there was a time between this and "Internet for all the things", when for consumers, AOL was the place to get drivers and such. But that's an even farther digression from the BBS topic (other than to point out AOL started out with BBS software).
Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
#75When 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…
Lotus users were just as fanatical.
They were, and Excel users are just as devoted if not more so. We had many people return their shiny new mac because Excel on MacOS is not exactly like Windows. And they were mad about it.
Lotus on a Sun? Why not.
How about 1-2-3 on SCO Unix. And Wordperfect. We had a salesrep (VAR) back in the day who made some scratch in the local legal market with the pitch "why give every secretary an expensive PC when you can buy one PC and a bunch of really cheap Wyse serial terminals". Our support folks came to really hate that guy (start at "you were using a typewriter 5 years ago...now you get to learn the Unix CLI" and it only got worse).
Re: Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
#76I love old computing like this. Games are fun and all, but it's always nice to see the more professional side of things. I'm particularly fond of CP/M despite not exactly liking the CP/M style of operating systems and their ilk (MS/PCDOS and NT)