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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.
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.
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.
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.
I've personally found gnumeric does everything I need. Makes it hard to take the "need" for commercial spreadsheet programs a little less convincing.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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>
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!
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
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.