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End of an Era: After a 30 Year Run, IBM Drops Support For Lotus 1-2-3
klubar writes Although it has been fading for years, the final death knell came recently for the iconic Lotus 1-2-3. In many ways, Lotus 1-2-3 launched the PC era (and ensured the Apple II success), and once was a serious competitor for Excel (and prior to that Multiplan and VisiCalc). Although I doubt if anyone is creating new Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets, I'm sure there are spreadsheets still being used who trace their origin to Lotus 1-2-3, and even Office 2013 still has some functions and key compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3. Oh, how far the mighty have fallen.
Though it took some doing to supplant Visicalc.
So it was Lotus 1-2-3 that made the Apple ][ a success. Good to know after all these years.
Mark Zuckerberg. Who knew?
I can't wait for Michael Bay to make a movie about it.
1-2-3 on OS/2 was also much slower at calculating than the contemporary Win32 version. Something like half the speed on certain tasks, IIRC.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Hopefully Lotus Notes (aka IBM notes) is next. Worst piece of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. Moving to Exchange Server was one of the happiest upgrades I've ever had from our IT department...
People are definitely still using 1-2-3. It's installed on every machine at an accounting firm I do some work for right next to Excel. I don't know why specifically, but it's used nearly every day.
Excel was "Microsoft Lotus 1-2-3" before it was "Excel".
And let's not forget Quattro Pro somewhere in there...
The infamous battle cry at Microsoft back in the 80s:
"DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't run."
Ok, that I know of Lotus was never on Apple... wasn't that Visicalc?
Anyways... when I was a kid, my father brought home a Commodore Vic20 and said "Son! This is the future!" and told me to figure out how to plug it into the TV. I'll not lie... to me it was a video game machine for years. The command line reminded me of exploring some cave... the directories different tunnels, etc... I was a kid.
But as the computers got better and I eventually found myself on an Apple IIe and a Compaq PC it got more interesting. And what finally made me realize what computers could do was when my dad brought home copies of Lotus and Visicalc. I would sit for hours making spreadsheets with formulas in pale monochrome ASCII. You could change something in one cell and watch all the other cells change in response. Prior to that I had no idea what programming even was... or how variables and functions worked. Those first spreadsheets are what made it all real to me. I thought it was amazing. I put my famillies finances on it. I budgeted my allowance. I made rudimentary war games. Really, Lotus (because I always liked the PC better) is what finally made me realize computers were important, and it was something I wanted to do.
Thanks Lotus!
And yet they still seem to be doing fine. While some of us may miss Lotus it doesn't appear that IBM will.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Goodby Lotus 1-2-3 in 3 - 2 - 1.....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
As a finance guy, I well remember the sudden switch from 123 to Excel. Excel started to gain traction by having a WIMP version that followed the emerging Windows HIG standards long before 123, but most accountants were happy with what they knew and saw no reason to shift.
Then Microsoft Office arrived, and Lotus responded with Smartsuite. The problem was that the other parts of Smartsuite completely lacked credibility. Word was already a standard piece of software, and AmiPro lacked essential features. PowerPoint was much better than any alternative, and the Microsoft software was much better integrated with consistent menus and the ability to link and embed spreadsheets within documents and vice versa.
Although 123 remained arguably the best spreadsheet for some time, it was impossible to justify the extra cost of buying a standalone package. IIRC, 123 cost around £350, a huge amount of cash in the early 90s.
So, in my somewhat anecdotal experience, 123 didn't fall out of favour because Lotus/IBM preferred OS/2. It disappeared because it was too expensive and lacked a wider software ecosystem.
Now if they would only do the same with Notes!
OS/2 failed because of its Windows 3.1 compatibility. If you can run DOS and Windows 3.1 applications already, why would you want native OS/2 ones? And why not just run the real thing with less cost (such as 4MB RAM instead of 8MB) and no worries about configuring the compatibility layers.
The DOS support could have been enough for games and legacy apps. An ecosystem of OS/2 games and apps could have become a new "legacy".The Windows compatibility wasn't able to keep up with Windows 95, NT4.0 and later, which killed it for good.
I actually kind of liked 1-2-3 and AmiPro, and continued to use the Lotus Suite long after most people had accepted Office as the defacto standard. I would guess I probably gave up on Lotus around 1997 or 1998.
At no point could I abide Lotus Notes, though, and I know some corporations that are fixated on that pile of cruft. In fact, one company that I was at not too far back got bought by a much larger company and I only just managed to get out before the large company inflicted Lotus Notes on the smaller company.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
IBM, why not open source it? It could be of at least historical value to someone, and it could allow for porting to linux and allow it to be used in a DOSBOX or VM. If someone here from IBM reads this, could you advance this idea?
Quattro Pro was the shiznits. Once it came out, Lotus 1-2-3 disappeared from our lab.
One of my gripes with OS/2 is that Windows software was even more unstable under OS/2 than under pure Windows. They didn't trash the whole system, but they did take down every Windows program when they crashed. OS/2 was rock solid running its native apps. Both of them.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
forcing Excel on us like this? I know the Microserfs hate freedom so they give a lot of money to their kind, but this is ridiculous. Why do they hate us so much?
Yes, I still have the MS-DOS version of 1-2-3 running in a Win2k virtual machine. Don't mess with perfection.
Lotus did themselves in multiple times in the 90s. Lotus 1-2-3's early Windows versions were terrible. Then Smartsuite happened, the most bloated and difficult to use versions ever of their Word Processor and Lotus 1-2-3. By then, MS had been incrementally improving Excel for a long time and it was just better. Calculation engine bugs and all.
Also, Lotus created another spreadsheet to compete with 1-2-3. I am drawing a total blank on the name. Someone help me. I'll think of it right after I submit, I'm sure. It was so hard to use I never made any sense of it at all. The one that had pivot tables before anyone knew to call them that. But the spreadsheet was so inflexible you couldn't do anything with it. Microsoft cloned its only worthwhile feature as Pivot Tables in Excel.
I think that was it: a way to highlight a really long array in 123, vs. dragging the mouse through a giant array. This is particularly painful on the Mac version of Excel. Adios 123, you are fondly remembered.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I love lotus notes. . Long live the Domino server!
. .
I imagine some Milton Waddams doppelganger in a basement at IBM headquarters who was the "Lotus 1-2-3 support guy" and finally decided enough was enough
It disappeared because Micro$oft was then well into their bundled-packages for OEMs, where they would offer huge discounts on Office (or even just Works) to OEMs to pre-install on Windows installations. If you already had Office, why go hunting for 123 anymore?
Yes, this is one of several things that the 90s era anti-trust lawsuits had intended to put a stop to, and was a much bigger issue in the European cases than the American DOJ case that was focused primarily on the browser market.
By the time the suits were resolved, however, the damage had already been done and Office (and IE) was the only player on the market. The browser situation recovered with Firefox and webkit. The Office suite market never did, and only now with people looking at cloud solutions like Google Drive is there starting to get some pick-up at Office alternatives.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I love lotus notes. . Long live the Domino server!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And no one remembers the revolutionary spreadsheet software that Lotus sold: Improv.
I believe it was the first spreadsheet that supported pivot tables.
I was fortunate and got it for free @ CompUSA. They were giving away excess copies that they received as a free promotion to include with purchased copies of Lotus SmartSuite.
Totally incoherent today? And so full of hate? Probably off his meds again.
One major thing I remember about Lotus 1-2-3 was how easy it allowed spreadsheet power-users to become programmers (maintainability of code aside) via "Macros". Since it was designed in the pre-mouse era, one typically learned and memorized key-strokes based on the menu choices. (The corresponding letters were highlighted, similar to underscores in Windows menus.)
Thus, to "program", you just gave the menu letter sequence in a Macro function. Thus, "FSfoo{enter}" would mean "File, Save as name 'foo' (fictitious example using Windows idioms). An IF function allowed conditionals, and one could "GO TO" cells that had further letter sequence macros and/or create loops. That's enough to make it Turing Complete. It leveraged existing spreadsheet idioms and menu letters to build programs around.
Accountants and clerks did amazing programming using Lotus 1-2-3. Of course it was spaghetti code, but in the short term they were "programmers".
I haven't seen anything like it before or since. Programming Excel is a PITA even for experienced programmers (in other products).
Table-ized A.I.
"Windows ain't done 'til Lotus don't run"
You're thinking of VisiCalc. 123 never ran on an Apple ][, I don't think.
That was a problem with OS/2. I remember getting disks of software for it, but you had to find them, and once you had them, that was it. IBM was never one to promote 3rd party software, and the ecosystem wasn't exactly strong, and IBM didn't make it easy or cheap. The OS/2 system (the operating system) was very solid and very reliable. If only it had more software.
1-2-3 didn't run on the Apple II at all, because that computer was far too inferior and slow and hipstery. You're an idiot.
I too used AmiPro, and I liked it at the time (at least until I learned LaTeX). Word never clicked for me, especially when it fucked up my thesis and dissertation (the only two documents I used it for extensively, and then only because my advisor refused to learn LaTeX). Even Apple's Pages makes better, more consistent documents than Word: with Word I never know where a column or page will break the next time I open the document on a different computer, most of the useful styles features are buried in menus (fuck the ribbon, I want to change spacing and fonts in various sections across my entire document consistently, not with little snips here and there).
Organizer was pretty nice at the time too, and Harvard Graphics (or whatever it became when SmartSuite gobbled it up) worked decently for what I needed.
where they would offer huge discounts on Office (or even just Works)
God I miss Works! Now @#$@$ Microsoft tries to sell expensive billion featured "business" applications to home users...when they'd be better off with Works. Sure it's not 100 percent compatible with the "business class" applications, but most home users don't need that.
"...DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run."
My first computer, a 286 with a 4Mb harddrive and 4Mb of ram, had Lotus 1-2-3 on it. I'm not saying we ran the local betting pool off of it and ran into issues with how much money could be pulled out of a bank at one time. Just saying. Not saying.
Ascii artist &
When PowerPoint was released, I was using Macromind(!) Director for presentations. Even the latest PowerPoint can't do what Director did in the 90s. Thanks to Prezi and friends, you can now do presentations using fancy JavaScript that kind of come close to what the pros were using 20 years ago.
The other reason that Lotus 123 fell out of favor was copy protection. They used a scheme that detected an intentional fault on the floppy disk. You couldn't make a backup because the program would detect the missing fault and refuse to run. Maybe accounting departments could look past that, but engineering departments with daily production reports and new product deliveries critical to the bottom line weren't very comfortable depending on a system with no backup.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I did DOS software development under os/2. It was much better than "native" DOS, because _when_ your program crashed, you didn't need to reboot.
The internet really is home to the worse perversions...
When are they going to kill Lotus Notes?
Wordpro is still available internally to anyone who wants to install it, for free. Of course 'support' is kind of a quaint thing as nothing's really 'supported'. The only difference between 'support' and as-is is that the help desk tells you to sod off right away vs cut a ticket and let it die doing nothing.
I think we still miss a universal, open source, Office suite conversion tool (Or maybe it is already out there and I haven't find it). For example, if you find an old .123 file, depending on the date, the best way will be to open it with SmartSuite 9.8, save it as newer .123 or as .xls. If you save it as .123 the only want to turn it into .ods is to use IBM Symphony 1.3 (?) to turn it into ods.
If you can not find SmartSuite (or older 1-2-3) you are doomed. So I think that an extendible open source converstion tool is required.
Remember it well and still installed it in a VM not long ago to see if it would work. Still holding on to my install floppies, if only I had a drive to stick them in lol
Improv was awesome, there really was and is nothing like it, pivot tables made so easy, it was mindblowing, even the pivot table of Excel today can not match how effortlessly Improv did it.
Given how many tax and 'finance guys' I know that still use adding machines on a daily basis I'm not surprised that many held on to 123 for as long as they did.
When I worked at IBM from 2001-2002 the first thing our manager did was requested Microsoft Excel for everyone on our team so that we could be productive. NO ONE liked using Lotus, not even the "old-timers" at IBM. The place I work at now is still desperately trying to get rid of Lotus Notes & Sametime, it's all planned to get the boot along with BES and all our Blackberries. Switching to Outlook and iDevices.
There are many use cases where a calculator (as we call adding machines in the UK) requires fewer key presses than performing the equivalent task on a spreadsheet or any piece of computer software.
I really liked Ami Pro. But Samna/Lotus never came out with a proper 32 bit version of it, instead giving us the atrocity that is Word Pro. Word Pro tried to be an imitation of Microsoft Word, abandoning the things that Ami Pro did well (especially its use of style sheets), and it was horribly slow.
OS/2 also failed because of the inflated pricing of RAM at the time. There was a period in the early 1990s when RAM prices failed to decline in the usual manner of computer components. (There was a second period of that circa 2000 that eventually led to a price fixing lawsuit and settlement.) Sadly for the fate of OS/2, this period of high RAM prices coincided with the introduction of the OS, and those high prices made the adoption of OS/2 unappealing.
OS/2 did a number of things that Windows did not at the time: full 32 bit code, preemptive multitasking, a virtualized DOS compatibility box that was protected from crashing the entire system, and a technically superior file system. Windows didn't catch up until the release of Windows NT, and the initial releases of NT had problems running many existing Windows programs, while OS/2 could run them properly; that wasn't addressed until Windows 2000, and then XP finally got it completely right. Doing all that extra stuff meant that the OS needed more memory.