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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.'"
I'd take Outlook in a second over Notes.
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I guess it's done.
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
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.
*** Don't be dull.***
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It ain't done till Lotus won't run.
I guess it's done.
Interestingly, I think you're right, Windows is done.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.)
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.
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."
As long as I can keep running VisiCalc on my TRS-80 I should be fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lotus 1-2-3 was still being developed as recently as 2013. What the hell?
Notes, you are next.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Trust me, Netscape didn't need any help to crash. It could do that just fine on its own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
What about migration from Organiser? Is there anything out there that can replace it, preferably by importing the data format?
I myself am not a fan lotus.
Never played 1, and 3 was a disappointment, but Lotus 2 f*****g ruled!
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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.
All this talk about Lotus Notes and no one references Futurama? I'll have to remedy that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpwofqzuKBc
IBM had to discontinue Lotus 1-2-3, they lost the original disk...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
First casualty..
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...
Herve S.