Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3

walterbyrd writes "In 2012, IBM started retiring the Lotus brand. Now 1-2-3, the core product that brought Lotus its fame, takes its turn on the chopping block. IBM stated, 'Effective on the dates listed below, [June 11, 2013] IBM will withdraw from marketing part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement:' IBM Lotus 123 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9.8.0, and Organizer V6.1.0. Further, IBM stated, 'Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these offerings after September 30, 2014. No service extensions will be offered. There will be no replacement programs.'"

Comments

How about cutting Notes?

[Cereal Box]

I'd take Outlook in a second over Notes.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Joehonkie]

I'd take Outlook in a second over Notes.

I'd take PINE over either. And I don't even like PINE.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd take anything in a second over Notes.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[sizzzzlerz]

When my company was bought, the parent company, who uses Notes, put us on Notes. Two years later, we're still fixing issues with the migration. Nobody likes this POS and that includes people in the parent company who've been using it for years.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Many would rather take a bullet than Slowest Notes.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[JDG1980]

Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[noc007]

What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?

Genuinely interested.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[CreatureComfort]

It wasn't Microsoft.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[TheDarkMaster]

Good question, I have this crap here too.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Fortunately, my current job does not use Notes. My previous job did. All I can say about Notes is that my previous job used it because it was simple enough for out technology challenged managers (we had a ton of them) to be able to use it. It wasn't very good and it took a surprisingly large support staff to run it, but the managers could do things with it and that ended up being why it was used.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Newander]

Corporate inertia.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Big Jim Taters]

Do you work for my company? Because that sounds just like my company. And we buy up companies all the time and force this awful POS unintuitive "software" upon all sorts of unfortunate souls.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[egcagrac0]

Not sure... does your company keep track of IT exceptions using a Notes app?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[kthreadd]

You probably want to use alpine.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Virtucon]

Groupwise IMO was worse.. Far worse.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[AmiMoJo]

Can you elaborate on it's deficiencies? Some of us have never had the displeasure of using it.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[sl4shd0rk]

I'd take PINE over either. And I don't even like PINE.

You mean Emacs, VI doesn't even- oh wait, wrong discussion.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[garyok]

I loved how Notes couldn't handle daylight savings (especially when a meeting request came from Outlook). Try explaining to your manager that you missed a meeting because the reminder was automagically set an hour late. God-awful POS.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Rob the Bold]

I'd take Outlook in a second over Notes.

No kidding. 1-2-3 dies and the abomination that's called "Notes" is allowed to live on. Tedious to use, painful to look at, the most powerful features usually not configured in a way to be useful. Die, Notes, die. Which of course is German for "The Notes, the.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[LDAPMAN]

Email and Calendaring work very well in Groupwise. Notes....? How is it far worse?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

We use a cork-board and pieces of paper.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My understanding is that "Notes" is really just the default public face of Domino Server, which is an enterprise-grade implementation of the Turing Tarpit: Anything is possible, nothing of interest is easy, and the corpses of lots of obsolete animals can be found lurking in the depths...

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Rob the Bold]

Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.

From my experience with Notes, it is (apparently) impossible to configure and use the scheduling function in a way that improves group/department/team/business in any way. I'd get invited to dumb meetings, and just to be a smartass, I'd reply I couldn't make it and that the company truck would be attending in my place. Instead of being insulted or irritated with me, my colleagues and bosses would just assume that Notes had somehow screwed up my response and ask if another time would work better for me.

A waste of perfectly good passive-aggression.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Virtucon]

Crashing clients, lost messages and since you mention it disappearing calendar events and worse yet, horrible support. I realize it's the only thing that's keeping that happy valley company alive but it sucked, probably still does. It's been about 8 years since I've worked with it and I avoid it like Democratic Fundraisers. It may have gotten better but I'll believe that when Barbara Streisand's nose gets smaller. There's a reason that Exchange has taken everybody's lunch money (although that's fading now a bit thank god.)

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Nethead]

We have this coming up in a few months after a very large and old French company bought our little aerospace company. If you were part of the IT transition team, please mail me so we can hear your horror stories.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[operagost]

Indeed. It's not hard to find Groupwise haters, even now, but they never seem to explain why. Groupwise was essentially the first modern groupware. Even on Windows 3.1, while Microsoft was putting out a bare bones mail program, Groupwise had a 99% complete calendaring system. The only thing that everyone uses that it didn't have yet was busy searches.. and that came with v5 in 1997. Outlook was pretty much still crapping in its diapers, in multiple ways, and Notes was a database design program disguised as a horrible groupware.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Lumpy]

"Crashing clients, lost messages and since you mention it disappearing calendar events and worse yet, horrible support."

This is what we experience here with Outlook and Exchange.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with the French and Lotus Notes? I've worked for two french-owned companies and they both forced that POS on us.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[DrXym]

Probably because they've bought a site licence. Once they do that, all rational thought about switching to something better goes out the window.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

is you company on a freeze right now?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[gl4ss]

What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?

Genuinely interested.

Employment of the notes experts and their boss.
NOTHING ELSE.

they can justify to keep using it by saying that it already has millions invested into it, even if switching to anything would be both cheaper for the next fiscal and less awful for users.

that's how it was at one corp. anyways.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Dishevel]

PINE was awesome for its time.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing Lotus Notes was good at was raising my blood pressure, giving me something to bitch and complain about, crashing...and having a button to resend an email. It's like somebody from a multilevel marketing company took FoxPro 1.0 and decided to make an email client with it, and continue using the same code base and back end for 20+ years (because 1989 never ended man!). It's bad software when the new version is rated on how, "less shitty" it is over the previous version, or when ususability is reduced in each version. The developers for Notes and the evangalizer consultants who push it have always had their heads up their asses, because it's the only reason they have jobs, and they love to push it, because they're ignorant of anything else in the IT world. I've got a large granule sand and razor blade encrusted cheese grater for where those asshats have their heads. The line I was always given at a previous job was that "Notes is great, it was just implemented poorly here.", which is a complete cop out, because it's never implemented correctly anyware. Granted, I only had to suffer with Notes 6.5 (5 long years), but it's bad when you look in the help file trying to find how to do something basic, then go online to look it up and come to find out, either nobody knows how to do the one simple thing that *every other* email client can do and has been doing since it's initial release or Notes doesn't have that capability. For $X millions of dollars, it better do said feature, and give me hookers and blow, but Notes would screw that up too.
asdfasdf

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Megane]

I first used it in 97-00ish and it was okay for that era. When I had it imposed on me again for a few months (in 09 I think) it was a badly-polished turd. I was especially amused that while Bloatus is single-platform (Windows-only AFAIK), they still felt the need to have their own scroll-bar widget. It's such an amazing pile of fail.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Just Some Guy]

That actually sounds great: "I was here when the company-mandated calendar app told me to be." Someone else gets the blame, and you got to skip a meeting. I don't see a downside.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[larry bagina]

PINE Is Not EMACS.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[David_W]

...and Notes was a database design program disguised as a horrible groupware.

Was?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[gewalker]

It was programmable, you could create document processing rules and do "business processing" of the documents. If you were not doing this, you just wasted a lot of effort / money with a product that was inferior in terms of ease of use. But, if you used the programmable features, you gained significant value.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[rijrunner]

I was at IBM printing systems when they transistioned over to Ricoh. One universal item that cheered everyone up was the possibility of getting rid of Notes.. then, we found out that Ricoh used Notes.. was just cruel..

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Nethead]

It's not Microsoft.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Belial6]

What basic features does it lack? And I don't mean, what features does a decade old version lack.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[booch]

What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?

They've fallen for the sunk costs fallacy. If they were to change to something else, they'd be admitting that they made a poor decision in choosing Lotus Notes in the first place.

Your mistake is thinking that companies use rational thought processes when making decisions. An even bigger mistake is thinking that the people making the decisions are looking out for the best interest of the company, instead of their own best interests.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Jason Levine]

[DOCTOR WHO] I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. [/DOCTOR WHO]

Years back I worked for a company that was acquired and we were forced to go to Notes (from Outlook IIRC). I found Notes to be a very intelligent piece of software. Unfortunately, it wasn't a friendly kind of intelligence that helped you out. Instead, it seemed to be a malicious sort of intelligence that would make Notes get progressively harder to use the more you tried to be productive.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[serviscope_minor]

You mean Emacs, VI doesn't even- oh wait, wrong discussion.

How is this the wrong discussion? EMACS has a perfectly fine email client. Shame about the editor, really.

Heh emacs jab.

One mo... /me hits google

Oh for heaven's sake. There's a frikin vim email client now.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

my sincere condolences ...

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[tnk1]

I remember being switched to Notes long ago at some foreign-owned multinational I worked for. It was probably the worst IT experience in my entire life, bar none, and I have done my time in the IT department. Outlook and Exchange are a shining beacon of Hope compared to Notes, which says more about Notes than it does about Exchange.

Although, I have repressed most of my memories of it, I recall the email client itself simply missing features that you would have considered very basic in any email program. I forget precisely what they were, but I think "Reply" might have been one of them. I may be wrong about that, but I am not kidding that this was the level of broken that Notes was. And that was after you tried to get used to the insane "interface" it had.

Bloatus Notes at a company is the ultimate example of people who make IT decisions based on anything but user experience and efficiency. If they use it, get the fuck out.

And like others said, I was switched because it was more "cost effective" to use only one mail/calendar system. Which is code for: we spent way too much on this, and we can't get out of it, so you all have to use it now. We wouldn't want to switch and prove that we're completely incompetent as an IT department.

Even today, just thinking about people who would torture their co-workers with Notes just makes me angry.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume the past tense refers to it being discontinued, not that it improved at some point in the past. I wouldn't know, having run screaming from the only cesspool of a company that I worked for that ever ran it.

About the only thing good I could say about working at Fannie Mae was that they never ran Notes. And I fucking hated that place.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[tnk1]

The downside is that it wouldn't work as an excuse, except maybe once. Then you'd be expected to figure out what the time was supposed to be and be there anyway. Everyone would hate it, but your manager would tell you, "It's just a tool, you are expected to get yourself to the meetings at the right time."

Fair? No. Reality? Yes.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[tnk1]

Pretty much describes it exactly. Except I can probably at least exhibit the obsolete animals in a museum, whereas there is nothing in Notes of even that much value.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

even a needle in the eye

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[egcagrac0]

Well yes, but when aren't they?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[NJRoadfan]

I remember configuring the Notes client for a family member. The procedure given by her office was two pages long! The program screams Windows 3.1x era underpinnings (.INI files everywhere) and UI design still. As much as Outlook is bloated these days, the most one usually has to do is point it to an Exchange server and give it log-in credentials to get it up and running.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[NJRoadfan]

I'd say the vast majority of Notes installs are just for workgroup e-mail and calender/scheduling. Most of the installs pre-date Exchange as a mature product.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[NJRoadfan]

Thales?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[ColdWetDog]

The Spanish Inquisition.

(Notes is about as painful.)

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[NJRoadfan]

I thought SAP was the ultimate Turing Tarpit.... does it do groupware yet?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

When my company was bought, the parent company, who uses Notes, put us on Notes. Two years later, we're still fixing issues with the migration. Nobody likes this POS and that includes people in the parent company who've been using it for years.

Share and enjoy.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[ColdWetDog]

Slashdot, and in fact the Internet as a whole, has neither the time nor storage to do that subject justice.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[ColdWetDog]

The failed Notes experiments can always be revisited by dropping some bad LSD. Or, in the case of John McAffee, some bath salts.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Belial6]

What version are you talking about? Version 2 from 1995?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[whitroth]

You mean emacs, the windowing operating system masquerading as a text editor?

            mark, whose website reads, 'this website proudly built in vi' (but who wish Brief was still around)

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[ColdWetDog]

Actually, we're doing a pretty good job here. This discussion will be (missing or poorly implemented) feature incomplete, but the acrid flavor of a Lotus Notes installation will be readily apparently.

See above, see below.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[egcagrac0]

Strictly speaking, it's not deficient. All the required functionality is present.

The UI is idiosyncratic at best. It's exactly as good as you'd expect from a 1998 vintage webapp. The original version of GMail was a significant step up.

Suppose you wanted to save an attachment from email... you can right click on it and pick save; you can drag & drop to a folder... but you can't copy/paste it to a folder.

There's no good way to paste in formatted text and lose the formatting. A lot of people keep Notepad open as an interstitial layer, lest their emails suddenly change fonts.

A reasonable, but recurring issue, is that you can't open an email saved from Outlook in Notes. (This doesn't sound like a thing, but if someone using Outlook saves an email and attaches it during an acquisition discussion... there's the sudden "I can't open that file you sent, what is it?")

Calendaring works, but the free/busy time publishing doesn't reliably work. (This leads to a culture of not bothering to check "when is a good time for the meeting?", and just booking it anyway... double and triple bookings aren't uncommon.)

Calendaring works, but certain types of calendar events don't allow you to invite others... meaning it shows up on your calendar, and nobody else's. (Obviously, you wouldn't want to invite someone else to a reminder notification, or an all-day event, or even advise them of an appointment - you'd only want to let other people know about meetings.)

Sametime (the IM/chat module) works. Sametime file transfers sometimes work.

Obviously, these are just my experiences with the version we're running.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm pretty sure that SAP is named after the weapon of the same name that has a very similar stunning effect on humans, rather than enterprises. Or possibly after what you'd call somebody who would buy it...

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[serviscope_minor]

but who wish Brief was still around

Looks like it is still around...

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[unixisc]

Isn't Exchange, rather than Outlook, the alternative to Notes? The alternative to Outlook was cc:Mail

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[hb253]

Only if you had clowns who did the the setup or ongoing support. In my experience, Groupwise was the easiest, most stable mail and calendar platform I have ever used, managed and supported. I sure do miss it.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[unixisc]

While working on NEXT workstations, it had Lotus Improv, which was pretty neat.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Belial6]

Notes is not single platform. It has native clients for OSX, Linux, and Windows. The server runs on z/OS, Windows, Linux, and perhaps a few other platforms that I don't pay attention to.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[davester666]

No, it's entire functionality is a subset of Emacs.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Nethead]

Zodiac.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[AmiMoJo]

Interesting, thanks.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[u38cg]

Because the only thing harder than staying on Notes, for us, is transitioning off it. Damn thing is like the Borg, except slightly better at adapting.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[clodney]

What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?

They've fallen for the sunk costs fallacy. If they were to change to something else, they'd be admitting that they made a poor decision in choosing Lotus Notes in the first place.

In my experience it is more that the soul sucking nature of Notes administers a thousand tiny disappointments every day, but it still gets the job done. And if the company is using Notes for applications beyond email/calendar, the implementation costs of a migration can run into the millions of dollars, even leaving out the software costs.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

My company uses Notes. It's slow because it's managing a 2 gb database locally of my last 6 months of email.

23 years and five companies ago Notes was pretty cool -- all our little offices dialed each other once in awhile and swapped emails and other info (message boards, e.g.).

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Dragonslicer]

"Emacs would be a great operating system, if only it included a decent text editor"

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[gmueckl]

The SAP R/3 client from 2005/2006 was (supposedly) able to do messaging and emails. It was there in the UI but we didn't use it. I don't know about calender functionality. Wouldn't surprise me, though.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Samantha Wright]

Actually, that joke has expired.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Exchange, rather than Outlook, the alternative to Notes?

Notes is a client, like Outlook. Domino is a server, like Exchange.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[lipanitech]

I myself am not a fan lotus. The only time I ever used lotus was to help with migrations from lotus to another mail system. I mean for its time was innovative but like anything else if there is no money or drive behind the product it dies. I am surprised IBM kept it around as long as it did but again with very little user base IBM loosing money I would not be surprised if we don't see Novell group wise in the same boat soon.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[OhSoLaMeow]

Whoosh.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

When they just came out of one :) I don't want o go into details, I am a coward after all

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Darinbob]

So in other words, just as much of a pain as Outlook?

I liked the idea behind Notes, though I only used it briefly. To set up a simple project conversation with just a few people it was easy in Notes, whereas in Outlook you would need permission from the IT hierarchy. Programming Notes was straight forward. Granted, over time Notes became just as complicated as Outlook, given that both IBM and Microsoft have no interest in making things simple to use.

The real problem I think is that most places never went beyond using Notes as just email and calendar.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

The giant financial institution I worked for had all these little Lotus Notes craplets for things like approving vacation plans and expense reimbursement. Every dept. had it little apps. Until that functionality could be replaced with something else, they were stuck.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Darinbob]

For basic email, Outlook wins (assuming you're forced to use a proprietary back end server devoid of open standards). But for doing more than email I think Notes had some very good ideas. You could set stuff up yourself as a mere user, keep a shared Notes database for a project to communicate ideas and issues, etc.

Other things have shown up since then that tend to be used instead, like wikis, though there's still the trend to capture and lock them up also, lest departments actually get work done without IT approval.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[alvarogmj]

Sametime works... if you have several GB of RAM, which I didn't have when I had to use Notes due to company policy. It would randomly freeze for a few seconds, and it was slow as hell. I still can't believe they built it over Eclipse.

Pidgin had exactly the same functionality everyone used Sametime for, and used a tenth of the system resources.

Both Notes and Sametime are horribly resource-hungry considering their functionality

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Frequency Domain]

The real irony was that Lotus killed off the Windows port of Improv because it was overtaking 1-2-3, which they regarded as their flagship product at the time. Improv was a dream to use and stood head and shoulders above Excel and other 1-2-3 knockoffs of the time. Every once in a while I dust off and fire up my old NeXT cube just to blow friends away with the fact that spreadsheets don't have to suck, and we've known how to do it right for over 20 years now. The closest modern equivalent is Quantrix, but that costs a small fortune so it's never going to see widespread adoption - besides which, it got really uglified when they ported it to Java.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Rob the Bold]

Every once in a while I dust off and fire up my old NeXT cube just to blow friends away . . .

Awesome. I wish I could use the phrase "my old NeXT cube" in a sentence . . . I mean other than that sentence.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[egcagrac0]

Of course. It's bad enough going to work at 2nd Street, much less getting attention from the folks in the glass offices on the west end of 7th.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.

I've used it as a collaboration platform. It sucked at that, too. There are a few tiny morsels of beauty (replication, security) buried within a huge, stinking pile of miserable UI, lousy development/configuration options, and terrible documentation...all tied together with awful scripting languages.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[rot26]

You don't frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur-king, you and all your silly English kniggots. Thppppt!

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[PRMan]

Groupwise IMO was worse.. Far worse.

We used to call it "Poop with flies". So yeah, pretty horrible. Thankfully I was able to shoot down Lotus Notes. So, no, not worse, but they're both really bad.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

What basic features does it lack? And I don't mean, what features does a decade old version lack.

It's not a matter of features. Obviously, Lotus/IBM did their homework when it came to filling in the feature checklists. They just never bothered to actually implement any of them in a sensible or useful way.

What features does it lack? Only a few.

A decent user interface, for one. Start by obeying standard GUI conventions for object selections, for one thing. Maybe write some dialogs that aren't of the form "(Some incomprehensible event has occurred.) [OK]"

A development environment that's not painfully modal, for another.

Developer documentation that actually explains, as opposed to restating method names, for a third.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Master Moose]

Always Notes over outlook. .

I am sure some of the reason is my embedded hatred for all things MS, but you can do some nifty things with the Domino Servers

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they use IMAP/POP, or does Lotus notes have a proprietary interface? My company uses Outlook, but that doesn't stop me from using thunderbird.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't everyone just be late?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Doghouse13]

From personal experience, that's pretty much what happened inside IBM itself. When IBM took over Lotus, it was decided at the highest level that the company had to be seen to be using its own products. Result - the whole workforce being pushed bodily over to Notes from the then-perfectly-adequate mail system being used. I'd say it took a good 5 years for things to settle down to the point where (a) everyone was finally comfortable with it, (b) the infrastructure was right, (c) it was being used sensibly, and (d) the company genuinely started to reap real internal benefits from the collaborative things Notes actually did quite well.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[unixisc]

The only thing I didn't like about the NeXT cube was it using the Mot 68040 CPU. NEXTSTEP deserved to run on the high powered workstations of the time, like SPARCstations and HP/9000s. By the time the OS was ported to them, it wasn't long before Apple bought NeXT, and neither HP nor Sun continued to promote either NEXTSTEP nor OPENSTEP on their workstations.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[bibendum59]

I had a similar experience. When the company I work for merged with a competitor we switched from Outlook to Notes. My understanding is this was due to the huge number of Domino applications (4K+) that were in use at the other company. Three years later the whole company is in the middle of a year long project to migrated (back) to Outlook. If you thought Notes sucked on its own you should try it out in a mixed environment where you can only use certain features in Notes and others in Outlook. Its the worst of both worlds!

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I pine for it.

Get it? Did you see that?

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you're the guy who is in charge of the whole mess. By that, I mean you have to maintain it, not that you had any say in picking it out.

I'll go cry in a corner now.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, you must really suck then, or at least your mail admins

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has all the features you need, and quite a few more, it's just that no-one on Earth can actually get any of them to work

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

not the same, glad to know we're not the only ones screwed on lotus notes

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, many kool aid drinkers think Outlook is better than Notes... on a strictly "as an email client" perspective, perhaps. But Notes is no more "just" an email client than a Lamborghini is "just" transportation.

And btw, if you think IBM paid $9bn for 1-2-3? Um, no. They paid $78 for 1-2-3 and $8.9999999999999bn for Notes.

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Notes was, and is, a groupware development platform. Use it that way, and get decent Notes/Domino programmers, and it works really well. Unfortunately, almost everyone who ever bought decided to use it as an e-mail/calendaring program and, out of the box, it's not much good at those jobs.

Steven

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[tedgyz]

Notes is satan personified

They should call it Notes 6-6-6

Re:How about cutting Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ALPINE now and it's still awesome.

Good riddance to bad rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing of value was lost.

Will they be open-sourcing it?

[JDG1980]

If IBM no longer wants to support Lotus 1-2-3 (understandably so), then open-sourcing the code might be a nice goodwill gesture. This way, whatever archaic organizations still rely on this stuff can always go hire someone else to maintain it. IBM has traditionally been fairly supportive of open source, and this would be a good opportunity to contribute to it without losing anything of substantial financial value.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 funny.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Insightful

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[fustakrakich]

It shouldn't be an option. If they refuse to sell or license it, it should be automatically put into the public domain.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[JDG1980]

I'd like to see an abandonware law, too. For software, anyone applying for a copyright should have to put the source code in escrow, and it would be automatically released a certain period of time (say, 1 year) after the company stops selling it.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[pixelpusher220]

It's a good news/bad news situation.

Good News: Currently IP law *is* abandonware. It sunsets the monopolies.

Bad News: It sunsets about as fast as a Venusian day

We obviously need to fix the latter, but fortunately the Founding Fathers new these things should be 'limited'.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[intermodal]

Seems like the only way to make copyright law do what it was meant to (at least in America): advance the useful arts and sciences. Of course, you'd have to find ways around conflicts of interest in the cases of products which have been superceded but in the same line. I.e. Microsoft Office 2000 vs the current product.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Mike Frett]

I like that Idea. If a Company has a product that it refuses to sell, license, update, support or any other option that allows people to continuing to use their product for whatever reasons; then, the Company should have two options:

A) Open Source
B) Placed in Public Domain without the Source Code.

The whole thing works itself out. If it's Open Sourced, people can make it better and have a alternative. If It's released freely without the Source, eventually usage of the product would halt as host Operating Systems progressed, which is what the Company wanted in the first place. It's same as if you legalized Drugs, the addict would eventually stop using, or OD which ends the subjects life -- problem resolves itself.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[hawkinspeter]

I didn't think that you had to apply for copyright - it's automatic.

An abandonware law would be nice - we could get hold of the source code for previous Windows versions and have a good laugh.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The code is archaic. I think that support moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to India almost 15 years ago, and IBM (Lotus' parent) never showed any inclination to add new features or update the UI.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Picass0]

Interesting idea, but it could easily be sidestepped. For intance would be easy for a company to pepper their software with simple library files that do very little in terms of logic. As long as these dummy files are used in newer products they could claim "there are pieces of code in that discontinued product still in use, we cannot release the source to the public" That said, IBM has been decent about open sourcing stuff in the past and it's wouldn't suprise me to see 1-2-3 become GPL.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

For software, anyone applying for a copyright should have to put the source code in escrow, and it would be automatically released a certain period of time (say, 1 year) after the company stops selling it.

The grandparent post had it right, it should be in the PD. The source, however, is none of your fucking business, especially since it may be encumbered by the intellectual property of other organizations who are still selling their stuff (such as system libraries).

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't think that you had to apply for copyright - it's automatic.

In the US, this has only been the case since it became a Berne Convention signatory. But obviously that happened 25 years ago.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The sun never comes out until the source sees the light of day.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Desler]

For software, anyone applying for a copyright

Do you live in a country that isn't a Berne Convention signatory? Because unless you do, no one has to apply for a copyright since the Berne Convention explicitly prohibits such a requirement.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell no. Don't get me wrong - I think open-sourcing unsold products is fantastic, but there could easily be proprietary code used in other, "active" products within Lotus' codebase.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While I support the spirit of the concept(it's kind of insane that software that is so commercially irrelevant that you can't even hunt somebody down and force them to take your money may still be under copyright until after most of us posting right now are dead), I suspect that such a law would, in practice, lead to a lot of 'on sale in name only' arrangements:

Using Amazon Glacier(just because they have a handy price sheet, not necessarily because they are the best), you can store seldom-accessed data for 1 cent per gigabyte, per month. Let's make the (probably pessimistic) assumption that your software product occupies an entire DVD9, so call it 10GB. For $1.20/year, you can have Amazon squirrel it away. Transfer from the glacier vault to the web is another buck-twenty per transfer.

When you want to discontinue a product, you could just jack up the list price by 10x-100x(depending on whether it was originally cheapy shrinkwrap or expensive enterprise stuff) to discourage anybody from actually trying it, and then keep it in the back of the catalog for as long as you want. Per decade doing so would cost less than a couple of decent six-packs...

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Waffle Iron]

No can do.

Open sourcing the software would reveal the secrets of the technology behind their "uncopyable" install floppy disk.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Register for a copyright? Are you a time traveller from the 19th century?

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[jader3rd]

then open-sourcing the code might be a nice goodwill gesture.

That also might make it very easy for malware writers to be able to find security holes in it. On the other hand, would malware writers even bother to target something that has such low marketshare?

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well since almost no one uses floppy disks for installing software anymore this shouldn't be a problem. ;-)

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[DrXym]

More likely they'll flog the tech on to some niche company to support that market the way they did with OS/2. Doubtless they'll cite all kinds of reasons they couldn't possibly open source it and some of them may even be true.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Dunbal]

Er, libraries and other proprietary stuff is usually made available in the shape of LIB files added in at link time, or DLL's. You don't get the source code for them anyway. So what's the problem?

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking about Lotus here. 19th century is relevant to the topic at hand.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[0ld_d0g]

... then all they have to do is to set some arbitrarily high price or put some ridiculous terms in their license.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[mrbester]

So the ides of March 2015 then (accounting for support period)?

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[KiloByte]

It sunsets about as fast as a Venusian day

The day on Venus lasts merely 116 Earth days, while copyright can take more than 116 years to expire.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 Redundant

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[tnk1]

Sometimes you *do* get source code to libraries. There are agreements that allow that to happen. Especially when you are working with big, powerful organizations like the government or multinationals. They can't resell it, but they get to see it and even muck with it to generate their own versions of the libraries.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[tnk1]

My steampunk Difference Machine does in fact run Lotus software. It was a port from the original A.B.A.C.U.S. platform it ran on.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[Dunbal]

Well obviously they would have no right to release code belonging to a 3rd party without that party's consent.

Re:Will they be open-sourcing it?

[unixisc]

This is a good idea. LibreOffice/OpenOffice is where it is today after StarOffice got acquired by Sun. StarOffice was far more primitive than Lotus SmartSuite was. So now, if one takes the last versions of the SmartSuite programs - Ami Pro, 123, cc:Mail, and the other 2 programs - the database & presentations programs - and opens it up, either as public domain or under an FOSS license, that would be one more good alternative in the market.

Incidentally, anybody know the status of WordPerfect's suite - WordPerfect, Paradox & Quatro Pro? What became of them after Borland folded?

Too Bad.

[jellomizer]

Lotus 123 use to be the main business spreadsheet, and combined with word perfect, you were ready for business.

But I guess DOS is now done.

Re:Too Bad.

[gewalker]

When MS released its office bundle that included Excel, and Word for less than the price of either 1-2-3 or WordPerfect, it was the beginning of the end for those products -- the MS office was "good enough" for most users and the price was a real factor when you were buying for a corporation.

Re:Too Bad.

[intermodal]

I've personally found gnumeric does everything I need. Makes it hard to take the "need" for commercial spreadsheet programs a little less convincing.

Re:Too Bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the gnumeric folks tend to make changes and then change the documentation later when someone gets around to it. We finally switched over to libreoffice here because people got tired of having to comb the web and irc to figure out the new way to do something. Too bad. I liked gnumeric better. It has everything we need and is a lighter weight than libreoffice.

Re:Too Bad.

[intermodal]

That's a common problem in the opensource world, unfortunately. There are projects who handle it better than others, but they're in the minority.

Re:Too Bad.

[cold fjord]

It wasn't just DOS, although that was its stronghold. There were also versions available for: Unix, Macintosh, Windows, and OS/2.

Hmm, didn't know this though: Lotus 1-2-3 : "The charting/graphing routines were written in Forth by Jeremy Sagan (son of Carl Sagan)"

I believe that reference to Forth should be, "the fabulous Forth language."

Re:Too Bad.

[NJRoadfan]

What really gave Excel a boost was the fact that it was a "user friendly" GUI application that ran under multitasking Windows and OS/2. DOS versions of Lotus 1-2-3 wouldn't even run under Windows due to its non-standard DOS extender (it ran under natively OS/2 since it was a "family application").

Re:Too Bad.

[gmhowell]

It wasn't just DOS, although that was its stronghold. There were also versions available for: Unix, Macintosh, Windows, and OS/2.

Hmm, didn't know this though: Lotus 1-2-3 : "The charting/graphing routines were written in Forth by Jeremy Sagan (son of Carl Sagan)"

I believe that reference to Forth should be, "the fabulous Forth language."

While you're busy looking up stuff the old timers lived through, you may want to check out an oldfag meme: "DOS/Windows (depending on the time frame) ain't done until Lotus won't run"

How about open-sourcing it?

[cpghost]

Not that we really need yet another spreadsheet program, but if IBM doesn't intend to use this code base anymore, how about releasing its source code to the public?

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[CrankyFool]

Opensourcing a project can be a pain in the ass (I work at a company that tries to opensource most of its infrastructure systems), what with internal assumptions, potential information leaks, and auditing for potentially licensed code that you're not allowed to release in its uncompiled form.

I don't see a ton of people out there clamouring for 1-2-3 to be opensourced, to be honest, other than people who are just reflexively arguing for opensourcing anything that's discontinued. I'm not saying that's a bad argument, but it's certainly a weak one, and I don't see IBM getting a particularly great ROI for doing the work to opensource 1-2-3.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have them contribute actively to Libre Office or OO.o

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that it's IBM that pushed Oracle to put OpenOffice.org as an Apache project and IBM employees are the bulk of the developers, right? Also they did contribute to OO.org for many years prior to that.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[pixelpusher220]

I don't see IBM getting a particularly great ROI for doing the work to opensource 1-2-3

unfortunately 'good will' doesn't usually factor into such calculations. There's plenty of benefit for IBM, just not financial.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, didn't they rename OpenOffice to LibreOffice?

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[Desler]

No, they renamed it to Apache OpenOffice.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate valuate everything financially.

Good will will be converted to a money value and evaluated from a financial poingt of view..

Any benefit for IBM, to be evaluated by managers, has to be converted to a money figure and then can be discussed. if it can't be converted to money, it will not be discussed.

That's how corporates work. the rest is myth.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[DrXym]

IBM have some OpenOffice commercial variant whose name escapes me.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . "Symphony" . . .

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[drinkypoo]

Nobody needs the code to 1-2-3. But it would be highly interesting to have the code to 1-2-3 1.0, because it would be fascinating to see how it was done on such limited platforms as original PCs. I had 1-2-3 1.0 on a PC-1 with 448kB memory — 384kB of which was on an ISA expansion card. Those were the days, I guess.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's weird, because when I do apt-get install openoffice it installs LibreOffice. If they actually renamed it Apache OpenOffice I would expect to get that instead.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[phantomfive]

Yeah, I'd love to have a look at that code.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[thammoud]

I agree that would be interesting. Until version 3.0, the language used was assembler before switching to C.

Re:How about open-sourcing it?

[yuhong]

That is because of your distro making this decision.

...till Lotus won't run...

[Mystakaphoros]

"It ain't done till Lotus won't run."

I guess it's done.

DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[Anonymous Coward]

(apocryphal slogan ascribed to Microsoft engineers in the early 1990s, who were accused of using inside knowledge of OS internals to the advantage of their own application development groups)

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[JDG1980]

I've heard a similar slogan with "Windows" instead of "DOS", as well as variations with "WordPerfect" instead of "Lotus". The fact that the quote has so many variations, and that no one can seem to pin down who said it and when, makes me suspicious that the whole thing is an urban legend.

Did Microsoft engage in anti-competitive behavior? Absolutely. Did this typically involve trying to deliberately break user-space software? No. In fact, as Raymond Chen has repeatedly noted in his blog, a lot of effort went into making compatibility hacks so badly written software would still work on Windows.

The fact is that neither Lotus nor WordPerfect ever successfully managed the transition from DOS text-mode to Windows GUI. This is due to a lot of factors, including bad management; W. Pete Peterson's book Almost Perfect is unintentionally revealing of this, since it indicates how the WordPerfect company under Peterson treated its employees like crap. They thought that GUIs were a passing fad and that they could stick with text-mode forever. Sure, the fact that the Office development team could ask other people in the same company for support may have helped on the margins, but other companies were writing good Windows software at the same time. Lotus and WordPerfect just plain didn't bother trying.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[Anonymous Coward]

The quote came from making sure Windows didn't run on top of DR DOS.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[drinkypoo]

The quote came from making sure Windows didn't run on top of DR DOS.

DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't run predates DR-DOS. The issues with Windows 3.1 on top of DR-DOS were a whole other thing. I was surprised they were actually affecting people since it really didn't make sense to run Windows on DR-DOS anyway. You'd run MS-DOS and MS Windows, or you'd run DR-DOS without any GUI (they provided a DOS task switcher with multitasking which was actually fairly decent) or you'd run Desqview. But apparently many people were quite incensed that Windows wouldn't run properly atop DR-DOS.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did this typically involve trying to deliberately break user-space software? No.

You must have missed the IE+Frontpage vs Netscape war.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[RetiredMidn]

Several factors over many years contributed to the decline and demise of 1-2-3:

- What eventually became Lotus Symphony was originally planned to be 1-2-3 Release 2.0. Lotus fixed this by releasing Symphony as a separate product; Symphony did very well, but the more tightly focused 1-2-3 out-sold it. However...

- Lotus's first product for the Mac, Lotus Jazz, was a GUI implementation of Symphony, not 1-2-3, and was relatively unsuccessful because it was more than many customers wanted (and too much for the 512K Mac of its day. So, where Microsoft had a successful implementation of a GUI spreadsheet on the Mac, Lotus perceived that it had a failure (although Jazz's implementation was quite nice, if perhaps ahead of its time). (An implementation of 1-2-3 for the Mac wouldn't appear until 1991.)

- Lotus's Intel-based GUI efforts were targeted at OS/2, which turned out to be a dead-end. It should be noted that Microsoft strongly encouraged Lotus to follow that path even as Microsoft was pursuing Windows.

- The first major effort to "modernize" the 1-2-3 codebase with a re-implementation in C (vs. assembler), Release 3, took a long time and was targeted specifically at DOS, lacking any accommodation for GUIs. Rudimentary graphics support was later bolted on the side with acquired (as opposed to in-house) software, requiring an awkward auxiliary file format.

- Trying to catch up in the Windows space, Lotus rushed an implementation for Windows on top of the awkward implementation of Release-3-with-graphics. This implementation was as weak as one might expect. (1-2-3 for Mac was built on top of the same infrastructure; necessarily, much more time and effort was spent adapting the code base for a new platform, with arguably better, but still compromised, results.)

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[westlake]

The fact is that neither Lotus nor WordPerfect ever successfully managed the transition from DOS text-mode to Windows GUI. This is due to a lot of factors, including bad management; W. Pete Peterson's book Almost Perfect is unintentionally revealing of this...

Almost Perfect [full text]

Word Perfect supported every platform known to man, each with its own fiefdom within the company. In the DOS era it shipped with customized drivers for every printer known to man. The slightest change in the product became a nightmare to implement..

In the Windows era, the word processor would expand into the space occupied by print shop, desktop publishing and other applications. The quick-and-dirty solution for dozens of home, school, industrial and office projects,

Word Perfect didn't see that coming, didn't see its value.

Word Perfect never evolved into an integrated office suite, much less an integrated --- managed --- office system.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[JDG1980]

Trust me, Netscape didn't need any help to crash. It could do that just fine on its own.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[Tapewolf]

I was surprised they were actually affecting people since it really didn't make sense to run Windows on DR-DOS anyway. You'd run MS-DOS and MS Windows, or you'd run DR-DOS without any GUI (they provided a DOS task switcher with multitasking which was actually fairly decent) or you'd run Desqview. But apparently many people were quite incensed that Windows wouldn't run properly atop DR-DOS.

For me, it was a matter of wanting to run DRDOS for its benefits and the occasional Windows program on top. See, the problem was that MSDOS was shit. DRDOS had a lot of polish to it, including a few things like the ability to undelete files (including the first letter) which Windows and even Linux cannot do to this day.

It gave you more memory, and for a command-line OS it was a heck of a lot friendlier than MSDOS, and a real boon for developers and gamers. Mostly it was a lot of little things, like the in-kernel command history. You didn't need DOSKEY or whatever, it did that automatically and unlike MSDOS, it would work inside applications. In DEU, for example, it would remember the command history on the DEU command-line as well as command.com. The CLI editor allowed you to delete words with CTRL-T which Windows 7 can't do. TYPE and virtually every other command could use /p to page the output. Oh, and DISKCOPY could copy two and from disk image files.

At the time, if you were doing DOS application development, it really had a lot going for it.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[drinkypoo]

For me, it was a matter of wanting to run DRDOS for its benefits and the occasional Windows program on top. See, the problem was that MSDOS was shit. DRDOS had a lot of polish to it, including a few things like the ability to undelete files (including the first letter) which Windows and even Linux cannot do to this day.

IMO the "right" solution for someone who didn't want to run any of the really fancy parts of DR-DOS was 4DOS, which just replaced command.com. I also fiddled around with a bourne shell (sh.exe) that I scrounged up somewhere that came with a handful of other useful utilities like ls.exe, and it was a joy to use in many ways but it felt inconsistent when running dos programs and having to remember whether a program specified arguments with dash or slash and so on.

4DOS had all the features that we had come to expect from advanced shells found on other platforms, like history and proper command-line editing. You could run it on DR-DOS or on MS-DOS, with pretty similar results either way. With MS-DOS you also needed QEMM (at least until 6.22 when Microsoft's memory management utilities became kind of halfway decent) but DR-DOS did at least have adequate memory management out of the box.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[yuhong]

Ah, DR-DOS. I mentioned in my blog post about the OS/2 2.0 fiasco that Caldera took advantage of the fact that Win9x ran on top of DOS to continue its lawsuit against MS, and that OS/2 was designed as a full OS from the beginning.

Re:DOS ain't done til Lotus don't run!

[bmo]

>modded troll
>part of the windows 95 install when OS/2 was on another partition.

Whatever.

--
BMO

Let's look back

[earlzdotnet]

Let's look back at what made Lotus Notes GREAT. Lotus Sucks use to show some of the best examples. Apparently the website is offline now though. Here is a wayback archive though http://web.archive.org/web/20080531232948/http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/lnEx01.html

Re:Let's look back

[Belial6]

The funny thing about that site is that a bunch of the things that it claims made (past tense. It was from a decade ago) are things that are common now in many pieces of software that people rave about the UI.

The original /.

[XB-70]

God, it brings back memories: an 8086 with 256k of RAM, 8 1/2" floppies....

Using / as the main way of navigating spreadsheets...

1-2-3 you gave me my start, not just in spreadsheets, but in computers. Thank you and goodbye, old friend.

Sniff.

Re:The original /.

[cdrudge]

God, it brings back memories: ...8 1/2" floppies

Things are always remembered bigger then what they really were.

Re:The original /.

[CreatureComfort]

Tell that to my girlfriend and my ex-wife...

Re:The original /.

[rvw]

God, it brings back memories: an 8086 with 256k of RAM, 8 1/2" floppies....

Using / as the main way of navigating spreadsheets...

1-2-3 you gave me my start, not just in spreadsheets, but in computers. Thank you and goodbye, old friend.

Sniff.

I remember SuperCalc, on my SuperBrain... CP/M, 64KB RAM, monochrome, two 160KB floppies, and one of them could fit the OS, Wordstar, Supercalc, DBase II and many other programs on it. And thank god for double sided floppies which required flipping of course. Yeah flipping floppies those were the days! ;-)

Re:The original /.

[jijitus]

8" were not used on PC's AFAIK... you mean the 5 1/4" ones.

Re:The original /.

[Virtucon]

Not on IBM PCs but there were other brands out there that had the 8 1/2" floppy drives.. 5 1/4 was new-fangled stuff. I had a DEC Rainbow 100 with 5 1/4 and 8" floppy drives. The 8" was for DEC 10s and 20s for bootloader mods for the PDP 11/40 front ends.

Re:The original /.

[slimdave]

Yes, it's burned also into my brain ... /rnd = "Range -> Name -> Delete" etc.. I calculated torpedo drop trajectories in Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day ... good times ....

Re:The original /.

[DougOtto]

Amen.

Rest in peace, old friend.

Re:The original /.

[Rob the Bold]

8" were not used on PC's AFAIK... you mean the 5 1/4" ones.

While I've never seen a DOS computer with an 8" drive, but I've certainly seen single-user desktop CP/M systems with them, and that's technically a personal computer.

Re:The original /.

[Lumpy]

Incorrect. the origional IBM PC model 5150 had an option to be purchased with a 8" floppy drive. we had one as well as a "portable" 9" tape drive to read the data tapes sent to us from the master office with the new product line update.

Re:The original /.

[Anonymous Coward]

3 1/2" + 5 1/4" = 8 3/4"... WTF do you mean? 8"? Your geek card is endangered.

(Yes, I know, I know, at some point or other there were also 3 1/4", 3" and even 2.8" diskettes. And 3.5" diskettes are actually 90mm diskettes. Fun fact: Where imperial measures are not allowed, marketing people convert 3.5" to 89mm...)

Re:The original /.

[Dunbal]

I remember our computer lab at school had one machine with 8" floppies. All the other machines - the ones we could use - were 5 1/4" though. Ahhh, brings back days of Adventure, Flight Simulator, and "Trek"! No wonder I never got anything done in high school!

Re:The original /.

[drinkypoo]

I had a machine with 8" floppies, but it wouldn't run lotus. It would run Wordstar, though. But I actually ran it on the machine with 5.25" floppies, because it actually worked. I would say Kaypro 4 forever, but obviously I got rid of that long ago

Re:The original /.

[Anonymous Coward]

God, it brings back memories: an 8086 with 256k of RAM, 8 1/2" floppies....

What planet are you from? 8-1/2" floppies? They were 8" floppies, not 8-1/2". Stop trying to show off.

Re:The original /.

[Bacon Bits]

For me it brings back memories of the cartridge-based Lotus 1-2-3 on the PCjr.

It's probably the only software for the PCjr I have that still works (other than the BASIC cartridge).

Re:The original /.

[Virtucon]

You forgot Lunar Lander...

I used to be a Student Admin on an HP 2000 in College. We spent our days getting rid of "Trek" programs because the Hard Drive was only 15MB.

Re:The original /.

[kermidge]

IIRC, several of the Tandy/Radio Shack models came with 8" drives. I saw one circa '82, don't recall the model number.

Re:The original /.

[wesk]

I was very impressed with 1-2-3 back in the day. Remember the wonderful macro "IDE" we worked with?

Re:The original /.

[Virtucon]

Had to be a mod one with the expansion interface.. those were the days.. buzz whirr click. and OMG the old cassette tape drives were horrible.

Re:The original /.

[Anonymous Coward]

There were indeed 8" floppies back in the day. The GP is really just showing off his age, and his failing memory.

Re:The original /.

[Dunbal]

I remember cutting square holes on the "other" side of single sided floppies, turning them into double sided floppies, lol. Hell I remember punchcards. Damn I'm old. I just built myself a system and for fun I have 64GB of RAM... a SSD hard drive, and a screaming i7 processor. Kids these days have no idea how good they have it. I remember fiddling with drivers to cram that extra kb or 2 out of that bit of memory between 640kb and 1024kb - the order in which the drivers were loaded was important! Hell, I remember buying a 256kb "expansion card" and being amazed! CGA - Amazed! EGA - Amazed! I'm so old, I think I'll go rest now zzzzzzzzzzz

Re:The original /.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first machine I was paid to develop for was a Sharp "Visible Record" computer (BA-2700) in the mid-70s. It had two 8" floppy drives, and a magnetic card reader (that was the easiest way to bootstrap software, as the disk drives were just seen as as a stream of bytes). It also had an amazing double-platen printer, so that it could take both 132 and 80 column paper simultaneously, but programmatically decide which type of paper to print on. The idea was that invoices could be done on the 80-column side, whilst recording an audit trail on the 132 column paper.

Re:The original /.

[Belial6]

Rainbow 100! Man I hated that machine. Not because it was a bad machine. It was actually pretty good. I hated it because it was 95% IBM PC compatible. This meant that 30-40% of IBM software would run on it. Too much to ignore, but a constant disappointment when things failed.

Re:The original /.

[jimbo]

Ah yes and setting up a RAMDisk but forgetting the flag for extended memory so it now took up nearly everything below 640, then discovering I had no rescue boot floppies.

EDLIN still worked.

Or the friend bringing over 20 floppies with stuff, as a Symantec Backup. I said;" let's restore then, give me Symantec Backup". "Er, it's on the backup"...

Re:The original /.

[jabelli]

I remember all that, plus using Norton's defrag to put IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS on the floppy first, followed by CONFIG.SYS, then the drivers in the order they appeared in CONFIG.SYS, then COMMAND.COM and AUTOEXEC.BAT, then anything in AUTOEXEC.BAT in the order they appeared, just to get the boot time down. I think I got the boot time down to a quarter of what it was, if not faster.

Re:The original /.

[kermidge]

Good memory. Never liked tape much, even for audio although it sure had its uses. Least with audio tape one could slice and splice and not always lose too much.

Lotus -- OpenOffice

[enterix]

Latest versions of Lotus brand suite were based on OpenOffice. Symphony was just the Lotus style shell over it. There was no native version for years. Anyway, it is interesting how IBM can walk away from products with arms... Hard drives, ThinkPads, now Lotus...

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Add the x Series servers soon as well, they are selling that off to Lenovo next. IBM is going backwards to only supporting the Mainframe at the rate they keep heading.

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just ThinkPads, but their entire PC line (ThinkCentre). It's just a matter of time before IBM walks away from their server lines as well.

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Symphony was just the Lotus style shell over it.

. . . so was anything said about Symphony in any announcement . . . ? Is that on the chopping block, as well . . . ?

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. They are supporting Apache Openoffice.

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Symphony was just the Lotus style shell over it.

. . . so was anything said about Symphony in any announcement . . . ? Is that on the chopping block, as well . . . ?

They quietly shelved Symphony, which is a good thing. Why they ever thought that a broken OpenOffice that they give away for free could turn into a revenue stream for support is beyond me.

The idea that it could be part of Notes was interesting, but in practice it only made a bad product worse.

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[bws111]

Quietly shelved? I don't think so.

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[rrittenhouse]

Last update was over a year ago.

Re:Lotus -- OpenOffice

[bws111]

Nov 29, 2012 was more than a year ago?

OO support

[anybody_out_there]

Now if (Open|Libre)Office would just do a decent job of not mangling Lotus 1-2-3 worksheets! I have some stuff I've been maintaining for over 20 years in Lotus 1-2-3 (starting back in the DOS days, but eventually moving to '97). I'd love to convert/upgrade it, but there are some things in there that just don't seem to be supported in Excel or *Office.

Re:OO support

[AlabamaCajun]

That is the point. 123 was just a highly functional tool that worked and well from when I remembered it. I even knew accountants that ran all the books on 123 back in the pre-windows days including income and balance statements. I'm sure it works with todays fair as the functionality ramped up. Open Office is the best bet as it was at last check still clean and uncluttered with ribbons. I may have bought the MS version in 2003 when it was close to working the way I though it should but glad I found OO instead. [insert flames about Microsoft here].
While on the subject of Office suites, using MS-word over Word Perfect I don't understand how the MS version surpassed WP. MS-word has never worked correctly and still does not have the html source viewer. I could only imagine how much junk is laying in the object file of a typical document. I use to open MS documents in WP and clean up all the hyper-text markup that was just garbage and cut the file size by 30 to 60%. Another product based on Word from what I could tell was Front Page, it just mangles web page source to no end. Even with only 3 font changes there would be no less than 40 font slash-font statements.

The end of history

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

In the same way VisiCalc made the Apple ][, Lotus 123 made the IBM PC. Later, when people said "IBM compatible", what they really meant was "123 compatible", because it wrote directly to the video memory, rather than doing screen output through BIOS calls; so "compatible" hardware had to address its video memory the same way IBM did.

Re:The end of history

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, WordPro, which I used in 1996, was the best word processor that ever existed.

Its key advantages were those three:

1. The InfoBox. Think all style options in one box. No menus, modal dialogs, icon bars or stupid ribbons needed. (The ribbon is a rip-off done the wrong way.) It also had a drop-down on top to pick the element in the document hierarchy for which to set the style.
2. Proper class system with inheritance. That way you could actually use the classes to design your document consistently. (Try that in OpenOffice. Itâ(TM)s a nightmare!) Every change you made from the class, was marked with a red dot next to the element in the InfoBox. Save it as a new class, select what to inherit, done. After a while you had your own style library and all your business documents looked really consistent and really good.
3. Proper frame-based layouting. Put your frames where you want, define which frame spills into which next frame. Add text freely flowing around arbitrary shaped objects. As opposed to others, it actually worked and didn't feel limited!

And with them you could do almost anything. Sure, it was no TeX or professional DTP program. But WordPro really was Word Pro. It was to word processing what Qalculate! is to calculators. Not a Mathematica or Matlab, but far from being just a dumb MS Calc.

So farewell, old friend. I will always keep a virtual machine with you around. Always.

The PC "killer application"

[Alejux]

Some people don't realize the importance of this software. Lotus 1-2-3 is what made the majority of people want to buy an IBM PC back in the day.

not so much "done" as irrelevant.

[Thud457]

It ain't done till Lotus won't run.

I guess it's done.

Interestingly, I think you're right, Windows is done.

Re:not so much "done" as irrelevant.

[H0p313ss]

It ain't done till Lotus won't run.

I guess it's done.

Interestingly, I think you're right, Windows is done.

ohnotheskyisfalling

People said the same thing after Vista, though as far as I can see, Windows 8 is far worse for end users than Vista.

And a tip of the hat to Context MBA

[dpbsmith]

Oh, my, sic transit Gloria mundi. I don't think anyone ever called it "Lotus 1-2-3," it was just "Lotus..." nobody knew that or if Lotus had any other product. But let's also take time for a tip of the hat to the utterly forgotten Context MBA.

"Integrated software" was very much in the air then. In fact for many years, and contrary to popular belief at the time, Appleworks outsold Lotus 1-2-3, but was "invisible" because it was sold directly by Apple while the bestseller lists were compiled from sales by distributors like Ingram and Corporate Software.

I believe Context MBA actually preceded Lotus 1-2-3, and was a very, very impressive achievement at the time. In addition to 1-2-3's three functions, it also had a reasonably capable low-end word processor--think WordPad--and a decent communications package/terminal emulator (you could use it to download data to put into the spreadsheet). It had a decent user interface and a high degree of integration--it wasn't just a suite. But it had an interesting Achilles heel: it was written in UCSD Pascal for portability.

"Portability" was sort of trendy at the time, because there was such a zoo of incompatible PC architectures. (The shakeout and dominance of the IBM PC architecture happened with surprising speed). Pascal and C vied for language of choiceCoding for portability had worked wonderfully well for Multiplan, Microsoft's spreadsheet. In a world of dozens of incompatible personal computer architectures, Microsoft could deliver Multiplan quickly on everything. (I remember a friend using it on his Commodore 64). But it imposed a performance penalty, which for some reason wasn't too bad with Multiplan but was with Context MBA, and it ran sluggishly on the IBM PC.

Lotus took the diametrically opposite track, writing in assembly language and often breaking the rules and bypassing OS and BIOS to write directly to the hardware. Lotus 1-2-3 actually became a standard informal test of PC compatibility; it wouldn't run on anything that wasn't a very faithful clone of the PC. Because of its speed, it virtually erased Context MBA from the market and from collective memory.

My personal limited experience with Context MBA was on an HP9800, a 68000-based 1981-vintage $10,000 desktop computer intended for scientific and technical applications, with good HP-IB (IEEE-488) capability. On that platform, Context MBA ran well and was a solid and very likable piece of software.

Re:And a tip of the hat to Context MBA

[JDG1980]

"Portability" was sort of trendy at the time, because there was such a zoo of incompatible PC architectures. (The shakeout and dominance of the IBM PC architecture happened with surprising speed). Pascal and C vied for language of choiceCoding for portability had worked wonderfully well for Multiplan, Microsoft's spreadsheet. In a world of dozens of incompatible personal computer architectures, Microsoft could deliver Multiplan quickly on everything. (I remember a friend using it on his Commodore 64).

The most popular home computers of the early 1980s – Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple II – all used some variant of a 6502 CPU. Therefore, it was possible to get "portable" code between these architectures while still coding in assembly, as long as you kept your display and I/O code well isolated in separate subroutines. Those were the only sections that would need to be rewritten. You would not get IBM PC compatibility this way, but at the time, the PC cost significantly more than the 6502-based computers, and didn't really offer that many advantages for the average user. It was used more in businesses than in homes, and the two types of software markets were more separate from each other than they are now.

The Commodore 64's CPU ran at a mere 1 MHz, so it was hard to get decent speed on any kind of application or game unless you coded in assembly.

One of the first true memory-mapped display apps.

[TheRealHocusLocus]

that made skillful use use of reverse characters and color (oh how we loved those beautiful 80x24 8 color character displays... sigh) to create a working environment that was comfortable to be immersed in. A proposition with. Compared to everything else the data SNAPPED onto the screen. For many of us Lotus was the first application to deliver the experience of scrolling through data vertically and horizontally so smoothly you got an actual sense of movement, without that whole-screen redraw-flicker that we had come to tolerate from software.

Of course this wasn't the only fine memory-mapped experience. I give fond greets to Vector Graphic S-100 Systems and their wonderful word processor MEMORITE, whose line jumping word wrap as you type was so smooth and flicker-free professional typists took to it easily.

I used to maintain an S-100 system at a local attorney's office and they had awful problems with dust from their brick wall being sucked into the machines. I'd get a call from the secretary saying "Get over here quick! It's changing the spelling on the screen right in front of me again!" I'd ask, "Give me an example?" And she'd say something like "all the 'p' are changing to 't'."

So I'd show up and take down the system and remove the S-100 memory card full of 4k RAM chips in sockets, say to myself "okay, bit 2" and count over from the edge of the card and pry up, re-seat the appropriate chip. Then replace and test, all good now. Then I'd ask, "Would you like me to perform general maintenance and re-seat them all?" and She'd say "No -- we're in a hurry!"

Job security. Not a bad service contract gig for a 17-year-old.

Copyright Act of 1790

[michaelmalak]

If the Copyright Act of 1790 were still in force, the first version of Lotus Notes 1-2-3 Millennium Edition from 1998 would have become public domain last year.

Re:Copyright Act of 1790

[KiloByte]

Which would still be ridiculously long for present technology.

Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[michaelmalak]

Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist

Lotus Notes was awesome before IBM bought it, and before the web seemingly made it obsolete. But replacements for Notes are only just recently appearing, such as Drupal and Joomla. That's right, what was called "groupware" back in the 90's is called CMS now. And Notes was decades ahead in terms of CMS back in the 90's. But then IBM bought it and its original vision was lost.

Re:Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[Anonymous Coward]

Drupal and Joomla do email and calendaring? Out of the box?

Re:Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[michaelmalak]

Drupal and Joomla do email and calendaring? Out of the box?

I don't recall Lotus Notes pre-IBM having calendaring.

Re:Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[Lumpy]

Are you insane? Drupal and Joomla replacements for Lotus Notes?

Let me guess, you also think that Adobe After effects is a good replacement for Microsoft notepad.

Drupal and Joomla are dynamic web page systems they are NOT CMS by any hope or stretch. Anyone trying to get normal corperate users to use those two are completely and utterly insane.

Re:Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[Dishevel]

Hmmm.
Both Drupal and Joomla are very decent CMS systems.
The fact that they are very good at displaying and reporting that content via web browsers does not remove their ability to be a content management system.

Re:Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[Belial6]

Notes still is awesome. IBM has been really good for Notes from a technical standpoint and a nightmare from a marketing standpoint. Notes was, as you said, way ahead of it's time. I would say decades. Unfortunately, it had some structural problems. This isn't a jab at Notes. Most software from the 90's had structural problems. IBM has spent a lot of time cleaning those problems up. Notes was great for it's day, and it is great for today.

The big problem that IBM has created for Notes is that they have not gotten the word out that there have been 8 version released since they bought Lotus. Notes/Domino isn't on v4 anymore.

Re:Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you folks are too young to remember. Notes is/was a CMS system as well. Notes proper became Domino and Notes Mail became Notes.

Re:Notes was the best before IBM and Web

[Dishevel]

I am not too young. Also. Where exactly in my post did I state or insinuate that Notes had no CMS capabilities?
Nowhere? Strange. Here I thought for a moment that your posting here was for a reason.

Now that Microsoft has decided to adopt the UI...

[DougReed]

Gee and just after Microsoft decided to adopt the silly flat tile User Interface paradigm too. You would think its popularity would surge.

Unintuitive interface... check.
Nothing works quite right... check.
Square confusing tiles in a grid... check.

It should be the Windows 8 standard!

Ami Pro ... loved it!

[Necroloth]

My first computer had Ami Pro (before it was bought by Lotus and becoming Lotus Word Pro) and it was brilliant! Even the Help was great - had an interactive tutorial which was useful for first timers.

Re:Ami Pro ... loved it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Word Pro might be a different matter. Not that it wouldn't be showing its age, but there just aren't a lot of full featured word processors out there right now.

Re:Ami Pro ... loved it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Same.

It's a real shame they didn't open source the lot when openoffice was first needed. It might have had a chance to still be around now.

Re:Ami Pro ... loved it!

[aaarrrgggh]

Wow... I forgot about AmiPro. Back then I didn't have nearly the needs later on, when I learned WordPerfect 4/5.1. I managed to get my boss to buy one copy of 1-2-3 and WordPerfect for a cycle after the Microsoft Office debut, but after that it was game over. Shame; wish something today would work as well, even with the crashing!

Goodbye Flickr

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo turned it into Windows 8. I'm surprised this isn't on Slashdot. Maybe Slashdot will get a tile interface too.

Die Notes

[DrXym]

Notes is without doubt the worst software I have ever had the misfortune to use. It's slow to start, extremely unintuitive (even 8.5), unforgiving, buggy as hell, baroque, and employs terminology and idioms which are meaningless in the modern world. It really sucks in every way a piece of software can suck. I probably wouldn't care if I had to run it once in a blue moon but this heap of wank is how I'm supposed to communicate with colleagues and organise my calendar. I cannot fathom how it manages to cling on so tenaciously in certain corporations when it is so awful.

Re: Lotus and Windows

[patmandu]

The UI issues changed a lot between the DOS and Windows environments. Because there was a need to maintain the keystroke compatibility (partly necessary because of the way that some macro stuff worked) that compatibility became the focus instead of making a great windows UI. Of course with a huge installed base, it wasn't a tough decision to go in that direction.

Yes, I was there.

First there was 1-2-3, then R3 (which included an OS2 and IBM mainframe version), and then windows development started from there...but never quite took hold properly. At the same time there were mac, vms, and sun porting/development efforts going.

The windows transition was a problem for pretty much all Lotus products, nor just 1-2-3. Magellan was great for DOS...but file manager obsoleted it. Manuscript was great in DOS...but Lotus ended up buying AmiPro as a Windows offering rather than rewriting Manuscript. That move was an early form of the 'buy and rebrand' approach that IBM has perpetuated, not the least of which was buying Lotus as a whole. It's far easier to buy a good fledgeling product and rebrand it than it is to develop something from the ground up and make it great. At least that's the prevailing thinking anyway. Remember that Notes was not developed by IBM...or even Lotus...it was created by Iris. Lotus controlled Iris, IBM bought Lotus, Iris was eventually absorbed and the Notes Server was renamed to Domino.

As far as open sourcing...Agenda has (had?) an amazing data engine for the day, but the UI was horrible, and nobody could figure out a good real-world use for it. That should have been dusted off about 10 years ago and relaunched.

Now IBM isn't even in Cambridge/Boston any more (aside from sales presence) and all remaining dev has been moved to Littleton. The 55 Cambridge Parkway and 1 Rogers Street buildings are long devoid of a Lotus/IBM presence.

LotusScript

[Rastl]

My old company used Lotus Notes and did use the 'application' function quite heavily. That's why we ended up stuck on it after a certain point. There were enough business unit functions built in Notes to make it cost effective to keep around.

Fast forward to when the company was acquired. I think it's been over 2 years and they're still trying to get migrated off Notes. I'm so glad I don't work there any more.

Amusingly we didn't have to pay much attention to the whole email virus situation. C'mon. Who would write a virus for Notes?

Re: LotusScript

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting to see how most negative comments on Notes are based on smell vs rational arguments. There are good some technical arguments though buts its a pity to see so many nonsense replies on ./ . On Not being able to migrate, perhaps this comes from either a skill issue of people doing the migration or otherwise that the interface it offered was/is still to sophisticated for vb experts?

I remember my history teacher referring to 123...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus 1-2-3? I thought that died 15 years ago. Next you are going to tell me Morgan Freeman is still alive?

May I say...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that Lotus software has no value and is being removed from the market really shows that the generational change has happened. People used to buy software and could run it on any computer. Now software is temporary, rented for ad-hoc jobs only as needed. The concept of history is slowly ceasing to exist. Fifteen years from now, how many software-as-a-service platforms will still exist? (For that matter, 15 minutes from now....!) All this stuff will just cease to exist. Today, we go back to the 1960s and 70s and discover computing history, even the 1980s. Today's software won't even exist in the future for anyone to study. Probably no one will care. I don't know, seems like we're losing something important.

An incredible piece of software

[Patrick Bowman]

The first time I used Lotus 1-2-3, I recall thinking "It's a good thing I'm sitting down." I'd toyed with Visicalc and Supercalc on Apple IIs, but they were crude toys. 1-2-3 left me breathless. The scope of the product, the ease of use (remember the "/" as the command introducer, so much easier to hit than Excel's "Alt" key?), the almost unlimited potential for mathematical, financial, geographical, statistical, and you-name-it-or-even-imagine-it modelling ... a beautifully conceived and developed product. As another poster put it, "goodbye, old friend."

VisiCalc?

[CohibaVancouver]

As long as I can keep running VisiCalc on my TRS-80 I should be fine.

What countries offer beyond Berne

[tepples]

Does the Berne Convention make any of these a requirement?

• A. Anti-circumvention law
• B. A copyright term longer than 50 years for works made for hire
• C. Statutory damages in excess of the actual damages
• D. Protection from compulsory purchase or eminent domain

If not, a contracting country has the option to make any or all of these available only to works whose copyright is registered. For example, the United States has chosen this for statutory damages.

Re:What countries offer beyond Berne

[Desler]

Does the Berne Convention make any of these a requirement?

• A. Anti-circumvention law
• B. A copyright term longer than 50 years for works made for hire
• C. Statutory damages in excess of the actual damages
• D. Protection from compulsory purchase or eminent domain

Do you non sequitur much?

If not, a contracting country has the option to make any or all of these available only to works whose copyright is registered. For example, the United States has chosen this for statutory damages.

As a Berne signatory copyrights are automatically granted. There is no copyright registration as it would expressly violate the convention. Your statement makes no sense in context.

Re:What countries offer beyond Berne

[tepples]

Copyright registration is not necessary for the package of rights and duration that qualify for the minimum under Berne. But I don't see anything in Berne that rules out requiring registration for any rights that go above and beyond the Berne requirements.

Copyright + just compensation = no copyright

[tepples]

When you want to discontinue a product, you could just jack up the list price by 10x-100x

The government can always take the copyright in a work away from the copyright owner by determining a fair market value for all rights and paying off the copyright owner.

Fade to black...

[Anonymous Coward]

... in 3, 2, 1

Sorry... Just couldn't resist.

Re:The original /. Nice!

[mynameiskhan]

Nice! Although I was a heavy user of Lotus123, before switching to Foxpro, my computer experience started with Wordstar on a 8086 c 256k. Indeed it brings back memories.

In other news

[nitehawk214]

Lotus 1-2-3 was still being developed as recently as 2013. What the hell?

Notes, you are next.

Slow memory bus in original PC

[tepples]

The Commodore 64's CPU ran at a mere 1 MHz, so it was hard to get decent speed on any kind of application or game unless you coded in assembly.

This was true of the IBM PC's 8088 CPU as well. Though it ran at 4.77 MHz, it spent so many of those cycles waiting for instructions and data to come back from RAM that it didn't really run much faster than the Commodore, Apple, and Atari micros in practice.

Lotus sucks

[[000000]]

Lotus sucks, even if they were to make it Open Source who would want to touch this! I don't say that about many applications but this Lotus, OMG how I hated it. I feel the pain out there for the Lotus Notes users.

Lotus Notes

[Kamien]

What amuses me is the universal hatred for Lotus Notes across the board on /.
I'm currently using Lotus Notes 9 Social Edition at work and I have to say it's good.

I'm interested in how many of your bad experiences can be attributed to pre-8 version of Notes.
Versions 8+ are quite decent IMO.

Did they ever add the "3"?

[tekrat]

Lotus 1-2-3 started out as a Spreadsheet and Database, with Kapor stating that they would be adding a Word Processor (making it a complete office suite), but I'm not sure that ever happened.

Eventually, they handwaved and stated that the charting and graphing was the "3", but that's just a feature of the spreadsheet, not a whole separate application.

So, did they ever actually add the "3"? Or has the product been Lotus 1-2 all this time?

Re: Lotus and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

AmiPro was a great editor. I fondly remember calling their support number in the U.S. from Eastern Europe, paying an arm and a leg for the call, to report a bug. I received the floppies with a patched version a month or so later in the mail. Say what you want, that was exceptional customer service. I've been using AmiPro starting back in their Samna days, when it was shipped with a Windows 2.0 runtime.

What about migration from Organiser?

[Richard_J_N]

What about migration from Organiser? Is there anything out there that can replace it, preferably by importing the data format?

"lacking the most basic features"

[Dr. Evil]

Strongly disagree.

Other apps are missing these basic features: PKI, replication, integrated scripting, document-oriented databases, rapid application development, role based access control, local encryption. I'm sure there's more.

Sadly, using Notes feels like being trapped in the past, but when migrating to Outlook, you feel like you're going further back in time.

What do you recommend as an alternative?

• Using your office suite to write documentation?
• Bolt on Sharepoint to give yourself some semblence of versioning and access control?
• Use a wiki with no encryption, limited access control, no offline usage, no scripting, and few if any rich-text options for input?
• Hire developers to create apps?
• Teach your users how to work with PGP?

Notes is crap, but there aren't good alternatives either.

Lotus 1, 2 and 3!

[Dogtanian]

I myself am not a fan lotus.

Never played 1, and 3 was a disappointment, but Lotus 2 f*****g ruled!

Re:Lotus 1, 2 and 3!

[Master Moose]

Lotus 1 was blown away by 2. I liked Lotus 3 because of the options and the "Im Going so fast, I look like I am going backwards" .. and then there was the turpentine sub game :)

But my favourite amiga racing game was Vroom.

i've heard of Lotus 1-2-3

[Anonymous Coward]

I have heard of Lotus 1-2-3, but I didn't know that anyone still uses it. I remember seeing the advertisements for the Windows 95 version when I was younger.

Entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck should anyone get anything? If shareholders all vote yes then I agree. But this bullshit entitlement "GIVE ME EVERYTHING" by virtue of someone closing shop is stupid. IBM owns the code and they can sit on it forever if they choose to do so.

/ f x

[Tony Isaac]

C:\>

Good bye, Lotus. You deserve a lot of credit for helping computers catch on with businesses back in the early 80's. A lot of us owe our jobs to you.

Obligatory Futurama

[CronoCloud]

All this talk about Lotus Notes and no one references Futurama? I'll have to remedy that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpwofqzuKBc

Locusts... 3... 2... 1...

[swschrad]

IBM had to discontinue Lotus 1-2-3, they lost the original disk...

Why Lotus Notes ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I our case, it is just a matter of bad timing.
When our company had to choose between Notes/Domino and Outlook/Exchange, it was during the years when Outlook/Exchange was full of vulnerabilities and was wiiiiide open to all kind of virus. (way before patching Tuesdays)
They got scared, It was purely for security reason.
Pricing, features and support was about the same.
Today, we are still stuck with it, it is just too complex and expensive to switch.

I love Notes.

[Dare978Devil]

Man, look at the hate for Notes on /. It's almost like someone said "I love Nickelback" and the groupthink was,"oh wait, to be cool, you have to hate Nickelback". Well, I for one love Notes. My company is wedded to it, with thousands of NSFs built over the years, it would take decades to replace that with Outlook/SharePoint. I used to work on Outlook, and I hated it. It crashed all the time, unread marks never worked consistently, and people who used to it seemed to think that one crash a day was normal, something you had to put up with.

Thanks ope office/

[ralphaostrander]

First casualty..

How it was killed by Excel long ago...

[Herve5]

I very precisely remember when Excel, version 1, was released. At this time Lotus 123 was the main, most famous and most efficient worksheet, and there were more macintosh users than PCs.
Excel was released and adopted in a matter of months in my company on the only basis it was "both mac and PC compatible". Microsoft did a huge and very efficient bet on the fact large corporations' computer responsibles were using PCs and considering macintoshes as funky windows-based things not worth.

And, guess what, Excel v1 had an easter egg, triggered going to the last row last cell I think: this would start a pixelated animation (black & white, that was the time) showing the 1-2-3 icons from Lotus wiggling like small microbs at the bottom of the window, then a big, heavy Excel icon just fell savagely onto them, smatching them to nothingness... Even at the time it was a bit borderline...

replacement is LibreOffice!

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice import lotus-1-2-3 file, and does LotusWordPro files too. Odd Apache OpenOffice do not work for wordpro.