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End of an Era: After a 30 Year Run, IBM Drops Support For Lotus 1-2-3

Posted by timothy on from the final-death-knell-is-the-best-one dept.

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.

156 comments

  1. Errr. No. It *WAS* Excel, before Excel. by Slartibartfast · · Score: 4, Informative

    Though it took some doing to supplant Visicalc.

  2. Oh rly? by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Funny

    So it was Lotus 1-2-3 that made the Apple ][ a success. Good to know after all these years.

    1. Re:Oh rly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      LOL, I know, right?

      I mean, look. Slashdot is what it is, and in recent years it's really gone down the tubes. But Lotus 1-2-3 on the Apple II? This is embarrassing. Just flat-out embarrassing.

    2. Re:Oh rly? by msauve · · Score: 4, Informative

      Submitter is a tyro. It was, of course, Visicalc which added to the Apple ]['s success. And, before Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC, there was Multiplan.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    3. Re:Oh rly? by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Funny

      I still have a red mark on my forehead from the facepalm.

    4. Re:Oh rly? by BitterOak · · Score: 1

      Submitter is a tyro. It was, of course, Visicalc which added to the Apple ]['s success. And, before Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC, there was Multiplan.

      Multiplan though, didn't have a great deal more functionality than VisiCalc (although it did have a superior user interface in my opinion). Lotus 1-2-3 added graphics. You could now select ranges and make bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts, and do simple statistical things like finding lines of best fit. This is what really set it apart from VisiCalc and made it the dominant spreadsheet of its time.

      --
      If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
    5. Re:Oh rly? by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      It was Lotus Jazz that made the Mac a success.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    6. Re:Oh rly? by msauve · · Score: 1

      You misspelled Aldus Pagemaker. For spreadsheets, it was Excel (before Excel was available on the PC). Jazz was heavily hyped, but flopped.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    7. Re:Oh rly? by tgeek · · Score: 2

      Multiplan did have one big thing going for it . . . it ran on *nix boxes. In fact, many of the old termcap entries were created for MS Multiplan.

    8. Re:Oh rly? by CaptainDork · · Score: 1

      I used Visicalc on a TRS-80.

      --
      It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
    9. Re:Oh rly? by clickclickdrone · · Score: 1

      You could also get 123 for various Unix flavours. I used it on DEC Ultrix.

      --
      I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
    10. Re:Oh rly? by clickclickdrone · · Score: 1

      You could also get Visicalc on the Atari 400/800.

      --
      I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
    11. Re:Oh rly? by ogdenk · · Score: 1

      Yep, I have both Visicalc and Syncalc for the 400/800 on floppy. Only hassle was the 800 didn't do 80-column text out of the box and neither package supported any of the 80-column solutions for this platform.

    12. Re:Oh rly? by clickclickdrone · · Score: 1

      That's a good point. There's a few 80 column word processing solutions but I don't recall seeing anything for spreadsheets.

      --
      I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
    13. Re:Oh rly? by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      You missed a massive joke.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    14. Re:Oh rly? by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      Multiplan was also available for the Mac for a short time. But it was just a spreadsheet that ran under the GUI, rather than one that took advantage of the GUI as Excel did. Excel added things like full GUI styling of text and dragging of column widths and row heights, capabilities that Multiplan didn't have, plus it had much better graphing features.

  3. The decline started with OS/2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Instead of supporting Windows first. IBM decided to make a statement about OS/2 by developing 123 there first. It was incompatible, and also very different from Excel. It was all downhill from there.

    1. Re:The decline started with OS/2 by Nimey · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    2. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by jonnyj · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:The decline started with OS/2 by Blaskowicz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by tompaulco · · Score: 1

      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.
    5. Re:The decline started with OS/2 by Cro+Magnon · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.
    6. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by Master+Moose · · Score: 2

      I love lotus notes. . Long live the Domino server!

      --
      . . .gone when the morning comes
    7. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by acroyear · · Score: 0

      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
    8. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I love lotus notes. . Long live the Domino server!

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    9. Re:The decline started with OS/2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    10. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

    11. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by CronoCloud · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    12. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

    13. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by AnalogDiehard · · Score: 1

      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
    14. Re:The decline started with OS/2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

    15. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by Jack+Malmostoso · · Score: 3, Funny

      The internet really is home to the worse perversions...

    16. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by StrangeBrew · · Score: 1

      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.

    17. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by jonnyj · · Score: 0

      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.

    18. Re: The decline started with OS/2 by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      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.

    19. Re:The decline started with OS/2 by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      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.

  4. Lotus 123 is same age as by Spy+Handler · · Score: 1

    Mark Zuckerberg. Who knew?

    1. Re:Lotus 123 is same age as by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2

      Actually, 1-2-3 is over a year older. It was first released on January 26, 1983. Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984.

    2. Re:Lotus 123 is same age as by damn_registrars · · Score: 1

      One improved productivity, the other flushed it down the toilet. Why did we reward the latter so much more than the former again?

      --
      Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    3. Re:Lotus 123 is same age as by msauve · · Score: 2

      Same reason P.T. Barnum got rich.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    4. Re:Lotus 123 is same age as by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think it's so much "we rewarded him" as we gave him leverage. Advertisers and marketers paid handsomely for the personal browsing data and truckloads of eyeballs Zuckerberg delivered:

      http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-where-does-the-money-come-from/8654

    5. Re:Lotus 123 is same age as by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah. Lotus only got bought for $3.5 billion. The people behind 1-2-3 never got rich.

  5. Finally! by dingleberrie · · Score: 2

    I can't wait for Michael Bay to make a movie about it.

  6. Notes next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    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...

    1. Re:Notes next? by Russ1642 · · Score: 2

      I had the pleasure of using it for a couple months several years ago. It sucked so badly I couldn't imagine why any company would pay for it.

    2. Re:Notes next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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...

      You really need to just shoot yourself if that made you happy.

    3. Re:Notes next? by coniferous · · Score: 2

      Ugh notes. That deserves a trigger warning...

    4. Re:Notes next? by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      The trigger is on the Killbots equipped with Lotus Notes and a machine gun...they are the finest available.

    5. Re:Notes next? by onkelonkel · · Score: 2

      "You really need to just shoot yourself if that made you happy." You have obviously never had to use Lotus notes. If I had to choose between using Lotus Notes again, or being devoured by fire ants, I think I would go with the ants.

      --
      None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
    6. Re:Notes next? by s.petry · · Score: 2

      Notes has security that Exchange lacks, so I hope not. Of course MS promised a decade or so ago to have built in functional secure mail at the same standard specs as Lotus Notes. It has gotten better recently, but still not up to the bar yet. MS could have fixed this long ago by adopting open standards, but as with everything else their goal is to make everything proprietary.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    7. Re:Notes next? by sunderland56 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      please please please kill Notes.

      Lotus 1-2-3: universally loved, ground breaking program: killed off.

      Lotus Notes: universally hated me-too program: still survives.

    8. Re:Notes next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seconded. Lotus Notes is an unusable bloatware that IBM needs to abandon for the goodness of all IT.

    9. Re:Notes next? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      I actually liked the general concept of Notes, just not the implementation (lost data, crashes, bugs, etc.). I even considered starting up a web company around a Notes-like product during the Dot Com bubble (it's what you did back then; it's our Woodstock, don't laugh).

      I'm still kicking around the idea for an OSS tool that is a kind of semi-structured Wiki for relatively small teams.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    10. Re:Notes next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, Notes/Domino were pieces of crap. I remember having to install in on about a dozen servers for different customers back in the 90's. If you left the installer to itself it would take about an hour to complete, if you hired a monkey to just keep moving the mouse cursor over the setup screen it would finish in about 10 minutes. WTF?

    11. Re:Notes next? by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      oh, you mean like Bluepill on SecondLife?
      (not very well known, but it is a fully immersive collaborative subenvironment where you can manipulate pretty much any element of the environment in real time - including other members (which you can't usually do very well in SL, they just added some code)).

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    12. Re:Notes next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's it a "me-too" of that didn't come afterward?

    13. Re:Notes next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Notes has security that Exchange lacks, so I hope not. Of course MS promised a decade or so ago to have built in functional secure mail at the same standard specs as Lotus Notes.

      Yep, for all it's faults (most people never saw more than the mail ui), Notes did a lot of good things years before anyone else.
      Things like nosql databases and excellent security allowed for some pretty cool web apps. You really had to avoid a lot of the built in web UI functions to do a good job though.

  7. Still in use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  8. Errr.. no... by the_skywise · · Score: 1

    Excel was "Microsoft Lotus 1-2-3" before it was "Excel".

    And let's not forget Quattro Pro somewhere in there...

    1. Re:Errr.. no... by ichthus · · Score: 1

      Or Wingz. I remember using Wingz on IBM RISC work stations at the University. It was great.

      --
      sig: sauer
    2. Re:Errr.. no... by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 4, Informative

      Thay're talking 30 years ago -- that'd be 1984.

      VisiCalc was from 1979. In 1982, Lotus 1-2-3 was born. It ran well on the Apple II. That's 32 years, not 30 years. Lotus 1-2-3 includes the bits that were supposed to go into VisiCalc's front end and presentation modules, but were rejected. Excel was 1984, and was released for the Mac. In 1986, Lotus bought VisiCalc. In 1987, when MS DOS 3 was released, Excel 2.0 was ported to it and was one of the flagship packages. IBM bought Lotus in 1995, same year that Excel became a flagship Office product for Windows 95.

      Quattro, Foxbase, etc. are kind of a footnote to this.

    3. Re:Errr.. no... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Mod parent +1 informative.

    4. Re:Errr.. no... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They're talking 30 years ago -- that'd be 1984. VisiCalc was from 1979. In 1982, Lotus 1-2-3 was born. It ran well on the Apple II. That's 32 years, not 30 years.

      So the author used a PC with the Pentium FDIV bug. So what.

    5. Re:Errr.. no... by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 1

      Hah... and so far, nobody noticed my gaffe regarding the Apple II -- 1-2-3 actually ran on the IBM PC XT IIRC; it'd been reading too many other comments and TFS and got sucked into a reality distortion field.

      Interesting that you should raise the FDIV bug (which was discovered via an Excel spreadsheet IIRC, didn't read the wiki page) -- I seem to recall there was some rounding error that hit excel spreadsheets later on in life too, where the rounding rules differed in two parts of the cell operations, so that you could have data that became more inaccurate each time the page was run.

    6. Re:Errr.. no... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lotus 1-2-3 NEVER ran on Apple ][ computers.

      I used VisiCalc and SuperCalc on my Apple and VisiCalc, SuperCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 on my IBM PCs.

      There was a Mac version, but it NEVER ran on the Apple ][.

    7. Re:Errr.. no... by Mr+Z · · Score: 1

      Lotus 1-2-3 was born on PCs. It never ran on an Apple ][ family machine. VisiCalc, MultiPlan and AppleWorks were on the Apple ][. (Well, technically AppleWorks only ran on the //e and later with an extended 80-column card. It required 128K or more to run.)

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    8. Re:Errr.. no... by Mr+Z · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, Mod GP -1 inaccurate. Lotus 1-2-3 never ran on the Apple ][ family. It ran on the PC from the get-go. It was launched in 1983, not 1982.

      Lotus bought VisiCalc in 1985, not 1986.

      Excel didn't come out until 1985 (not 1984), and it was never ported to DOS. Its first appearance on a PC was as a Windows version in 1987. It came with a run-time version of Windows if you didn't already have Windows. Excel managed to kill Lotus 1-2-3 primarily because it was born as a GUI app and was native GUI all the way through. Lotus 1-2-3 stumbled on its way to the GUI, which allowed Excel to eventually overtake it.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    9. Re:Errr.. no... by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 1

      Yeah; I'm surprised nobody read (or at least admitted to reading) my second comment that flagged up some of that. Lotus 1-2-3 was for the IBM PC XT. Never touched the Apple II.

      However, the dates/etc. are actually accurate, somewhat.
      Lotus started buying VisiCalc in 1985, but the deal wasn't actually finished until 1986.
      Excel came out in 1984 (I've got a copy of it), but didn't go out through distribution channels until 1985. I was going to say 1985 on this one since that's when it was officially available in stores, but then decided to go with 1984, as it WAS available.
      "Excel for MS DOS 3" came with a Windows runtime; I originally had listed it as coming out for Windows in 1987, but then figured I'd go with the marketing.

      And the replacement of 1-2-3 with Excel was exactly as you said -- that, and the fact that right out of the door in 1987, you could buy a GUI that would run your old DOS apps AND came with Excel. A lot of businesses thought this was a good deal.

    10. Re:Errr.. no... by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      Lotus 1-2-3 was great. I figured out how to use it without a manual and did some impressive stuff, back in 81. I still can't figure out how to use Excel though.

    11. Re:Errr.. no... by Mr+Z · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ah, boundary conditions on the dates. Makes sense.

      I had read that Excel had preview copies out in 1984 (which is fairly quick, considering the Mac itself launched in 1984), but didn't launch officially until 1985. And I suppose, since Windows was still deridingly referred to as "Wintendo" in some circles and generally not widely adopted on PCs, it makes sense that Microsoft would go with an "Excel for MS-DOS 3" marketing stance, even though it really was a Windows app.

      FWIW, WordPerfect, my favorite word processor of the early-to-mid-90s (replacing AppleWorks and ///EasyPieces on the Apple //e and Apple ///) got subsumed in the same way as Lotus 1-2-3 did by Excel. While Word for DOS was nothing special, Word for Windows actually was a proper Windows application by the time Word 6 came out. WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS was great, but WordPerfect 6 lost it somehow. The DOS version overreached, trying to bring WYSIWYG into the character-oriented DOS world. The Windows version clung too strongly to their DOS traditions and never really embraced the GUI properly. It was a messy disaster. Microsoft Word 6, for all its faults, was at least largely consistent with itself and the Windows environment around it. (I still miss Reveal Codes though, to this day.)

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    12. Re: Errr.. no... by osiaq · · Score: 0

      "I'm an MC Historical Inaccuracy I drop lyrical bombs like Hiroshima in 73..." Lajolie Jon

    13. Re:Errr.. no... by MobyTurbo · · Score: 2

      No, Mod GP -1 inaccurate. Lotus 1-2-3 never ran on the Apple ][ family. It ran on the PC from the get-go. It was launched in 1983, not 1982.

      I'll vouch for that since I'm over 40. ;) Darned millenials who get their microcomputer history from vague recollections of wikipedia articles.

    14. Re:Errr.. no... by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      Another misstep for 1-2-3 was that Lotus was focused on OS/2 development, not Windows.

    15. Re:Errr.. no... by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      I don't miss Reveal Codes. The need for it showed that the character decoration model of WordPerfect was fundamentally broken. A word processor that got the model right, like the late lamented Ami Pro (the model there was essentially like Cascading Style Sheets on the web, but long before those came along), had no need for Reveal Codes because you always got what you expected.

    16. Re:Errr.. no... by Mr+Z · · Score: 1

      Oh, don't get me wrong. I definitely prefer a more style-sheet oriented way of declaring how a document should look, and then writing my document tagged in the elements of that style. Something style-sheet oriented is vastly superior to something more formatting-oriented at a lower level.

      The problem is that most GUIs, in an effort to reduce clutter, make it at best cumbersome and at worst impossible to determine if your cursor is inside or outside of a formatting tag. (And then there's Word and Outlook, who add a bunch of heuristic behaviors on top of that that just make it worse. I've had to nuke whole paragraphs just because there's some weird 'hot point' in the middle of a line somewhere that keeps making the editor go gonzo. FrameMaker is not as bad, but it gets weird in other ways, especially with figures, tables, their anchors and their captions. And then there's the brokenness of nearly every browser-based rich-text editing widget ever.)

      I would much rather have a WYSIWYG preview and a separate, less WYSIWYG editing mode that was more tag oriented. Heck, I'd write my specifications in TeX or LaTeX if they let me. But, alas, I'm stuck with FrameMaker and Word. At least with FM, they force us to never use local formatting overrides and stick to the style sheet. They strip all formatting overrides when compiling a book.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    17. Re:Errr.. no... by geekoid · · Score: 1

      Not quit right.

      To say the first version was for windows is a little dis-indigenous. Windows was a DOS program back then, and excel could be started form DOS.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    18. Re:Errr.. no... by Mr+Z · · Score: 1

      It was implemented against the Win16 API, and required a Windows runtime to operate. It was no less a Windows program than any other Windows program at the time. You could launch it from DOS, sure, but if that's your criteria, there wasn't a Windows program before Win95, the first Windows version to boot directly to Windows rather than launching from DOS.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    19. Re:Errr.. no... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not quit right. To say the first version was for windows is a little dis-indigenous. Windows was a DOS program back then, and excel could be started form DOS.

      It's not "disingenuous" at all. There was no DOS version of Excel, period.

  9. Don't forget by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The infamous battle cry at Microsoft back in the 80s:

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

  10. Lotus 1-2-3 by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by tibit · · Score: 2

      It's better than that - you were using purely functional programming. Lotus, without macros, is as purely functional as Haskell without monads.

      --
      A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
    2. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by dj245 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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!

      I heard that when accountants first saw demos of Visicalc, many of them literally broke down in tears when they realized how much of the "boring" parts of their job were going to be eliminated.

      --
      Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
    3. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by antdude · · Score: 1

      Heh. My parents got me a Texas Instrument 99/4A computer so I could use it for homeworks when I was young. I hated it, but I found out it could do video games like my Atari 2600 and arcades. Then, I liked it! I haven't owned a video game console since then! it was all computer games for me. http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm... for my list of what I had and have. ;)

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    4. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      I heard that when accountants first saw demos of Visicalc, many of them literally broke down in tears when they realized how much of the "boring" parts of their job were going to be eliminated.

      Tears of joy, or of sadness?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by Smurf · · Score: 1

      Ok, that I know of Lotus was never on Apple... wasn't that Visicalc?

      Actually, there were a couple of versions of Lotus 1-2-3 for Mac OS.

    6. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One of those times was during the transition to PPC. Excel was going to be a year late to get a PPC native version, and the PPC native version of Word was so bad that it was slower then the previous version in emulation. Lotus 1-2-3 came out for the Mac (don't know if it was PPC Native or not) and was so bad that there was a month that Excel had a greater then 100% share of the Mac spreadsheet market. Yes, more copies of Lotus 1-2-3 were being returned then all other spreadsheets for the Mac were being sold.

    7. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by narcc · · Score: 1

      . The command line reminded me of exploring some cave... the directories different tunnels, etc... I was a kid.

      Not on your Vic-20.

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    8. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 by Smurf · · Score: 1

      Hmmm... I don't recall that incident.

      But I can tell you that whatever happened with Lotus 1-2-3 had nothing to do with the M68k to PPC transition, as the two versions of Lotus 1-2-3 for Mac were released in 1991 and 1992 while the first Power Mac was released in 1994.

  11. And yet IBM soldiers on... by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Informative
    IBM has sold off or abandoned many of their best consumer products:
    • OS/2
    • ThinkPads (and ThinkCentres)
    • The PowerPC CPU line
    • (what became) Lexmark Printers
    • DeskStar hard drives
    • x86 servers

    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.
    1. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      IBM Did a lot of big screwups.
      OS/2 their marketing was horrible, they had an opportunity with Windows 3.1 lagging for too long, but they made a stupid commercial that the public didn't even know what it was about. And they let Microsoft make Windows 95 seem like what Windows 7 is. (and cost hundreds of dollars less)

      The PowerPC line, They were doing good until the Gigahertz range was common in Intel, Power PC was still in MHZ. Intel started to make much faster chips and PowerPC couldn't get caught up.

      Lexmark Printers, I hated repairing those guys used by Banks and other IBM shops, they in general were hard to maintain.

      DeskStar hard drives. They weret nicknamed DeathStar hard drives for a reason.

      x86 Servers. Why go with IBM when everyone else had one as well.

      The ThinkPad was good.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 2

      They are not doing fine. All thats left is a few aging mainframe platforms which are shrinking niche and have been for decades.

    3. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      I wonder what happened to their Auschwitz counting machines?

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    4. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by pastafazou · · Score: 1

      Your opinion and the facts don't seem to be very much aligned.... 10 Year IBM Financial Performance

    5. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Watson is the future.

    6. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by rssrss · · Score: 1

      Think Pads, now made by Lenovo, are still good, still solidly built, and very difficult to break. They are my go to advice for Windows laptops.

      --
      In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
    7. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by damn_registrars · · Score: 1

      OS/2 their marketing was horrible, they had an opportunity with Windows 3.1 lagging for too long, but they made a stupid commercial that the public didn't even know what it was about. And they let Microsoft make Windows 95 seem like what Windows 7 is. (and cost hundreds of dollars less)

      I agree that OS/2 represented one of the greatest marketing screw-ups in the history of marketing. They should have eaten Microsoft's lunch with OS/2 but instead found themselves on the outside looking in. IIRC they tried the brilliant slogan of "I just totally warped my computer!" which a lot of people had a hard time comprehending to be a good thing.

      It was, nonetheless, an excellent product for its time. IIRC it was still running on ATMs and other embedded platforms not too long ago.

      The PowerPC line, They were doing good until the Gigahertz range was common in Intel, Power PC was still in MHZ. Intel started to make much faster chips and PowerPC couldn't get caught up.

      I think they could have saved this without breaking their necks for GHz. That said, they did pull off quite a feat when they had all three of the current-generation home gaming consoles running on PowerPC or PowerPC-derived CPUs. The CPUs were able to to great things at lower clock speeds, but once again IBM was failed - at least in part - by wholly inept marketing.

      Lexmark Printers, I hated repairing those guys used by Banks and other IBM shops, they in general were hard to maintain.

      Maintenance wasn't great, but they brought some important technologies to the consumer.

      DeskStar hard drives. They weret nicknamed DeathStar hard drives for a reason.

      I would say this was yet another case of IBM collapsing under failures of bad marketing. They had one generation of drives that went down badly, and ended up giving up the whole shooting match as a result. DeskStars on either side of the "DeathStar" generation were excellent, I owned many over the years. There is a reason why Hitachi kept the DeskStar name going after buying it from IBM, it represented quality hard drives (excluding one awful generation).

      x86 Servers. Why go with IBM when everyone else had one as well.

      From my experience it was worth it to get an IBM server due to ease of maintenance and better service contract terms.

      The ThinkPad was good.

      A lot of people will tell you it still is, even under Lenovo. I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad right now and it's doing as well as the IBM ThinkPad it replaced. I haven't tried out the Lenovo warranty yet, though.

      --
      Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    8. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by tompaulco · · Score: 1

      The PowerPC line, They were doing good until the Gigahertz range was common in Intel, Power PC was still in MHZ. Intel started to make much faster chips and PowerPC couldn't get caught up.

      of course PowerPC was RISC and Intel CPUs were CISC. It is an apples to oranges comparison. Kind of like how I have a 3.1 GHz SandyRidge processor right now and it is about 10 times faster than the 3.1 GHz process I had in my previous 8 year old computer.

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
    9. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by tomhath · · Score: 1

      His opinion is accurate. Your graph shows Revenue per Share. But look at what happened to the number of shares: Dec/04 1701, Dec/13 1103. They bought back shares to prop up their stock price and make Revenue per Share look better. During that ten year period Total Revenue went from $96B to $98B, essentially no growth in ten years.

    10. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Continuous growth = cancer. No growth is a mature organism.

    11. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      The PowerPC line, They were doing good until the Gigahertz range was common in Intel, Power PC was still in MHZ. Intel started to make much faster chips and PowerPC couldn't get caught up.

      I think they could have saved this without breaking their necks for GHz. That said, they did pull off quite a feat when they had all three of the current-generation home gaming consoles

      PowerPC is a rather sad history, and it was good as an embedded processor. Of course, a fruity company demanded more and more and eventually Motorola couldn't keep up with the G4 (Motorola was doing plenty of work for the military selling them PowerPCs for their embedded uses and decided Apple was an annoyance). So Apple went to IBM with the G5 (which lacked some stuff like the bi-endianess, which resulted in PC emulators breaking), but IBM couldn't make them fast enough either, so demand for the top end Macs kept outstripping supply.

      IBM also had a whole line of embedded PowerPCs - the 40x series (including the 403LP, for low power. Because it was frequency agile so you could drop the frequency of the core so quick, what they did was drop it when you hit the idle loop. When you left the idle loop, it went back to full speed). In the end, when Apple moved away from PowerPC, the G5 lived on by stripping out parts like out-of-order execution to become the CPUs of the PS3 and Xbox360. Even then yields weren't too great - the reason the Xbox360 has 3 PowerPC cores is because there's 4, but yields were such that 3 of 4 could be made to work cost-effectively.

      Then the rise of ARM happened which pretty much doomed PowerPC (available from both Motorola and IBM, now Motorola and AMCC).

      Not to worry, PowerPC is really a stripped down POWER processor, and modern PowerPC code can run on POWER architecture systems unmodified - it's machine language compatible.

    12. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Continuous growth is common in reptiles and most fish.

    13. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      0.2%pa growth over ten years is pretty much a 30% overall drop - accounting for inflation.

      Basic math.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    14. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wonder what happened to their Auschwitz counting machines?

      It retired to Argentina in the final days of the Third Reich. I heard Augusto Pinochet contracted with the Argentine Government for time-sharing on an Auschwitz Counting Machine.

    15. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      their best consumer products .... snip ....DeskStar hard drives

      I just spat coffee on my monitor.

      Now excuse me while I go huddle in the corner trying to make the memories of years of repeated dataloss go away.

    16. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Apple used to have media campaigns based on big, blatant benchmarking lies. They cooked up Photoshop benchmarks, which if you pay minimal attention were not actually benchmarking Photoshop but some specially prepared plugins.
      Find a workload that favours your CPU, create an artificial benchmark disguised as an useful program, hand optimize it like fuck on Mac/PPC and make a sloppy variant for Windows/x86. Then you can boast that e.g. PowerPC G3 is twice as fast as Pentium II in "Photoshop".

    17. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by sylvandb · · Score: 1

      The PowerPC line, They were doing good until the Gigahertz range was common in Intel, Power PC was still in MHZ. Intel started to make much faster chips and PowerPC couldn't get caught up.

      of course PowerPC was RISC and Intel CPUs were CISC.

      Yet that makes what happened even more strange. A long touted advantage of RISC was that because of its simplicity it could be clocked so much faster than CISC that doing less per instruction would still be faster net throughput. Yet what happened was that CISC (in the hands of Intel) could and did do and even outdo all the optimizations of RISC, including clock speed.

      Now ARM has been making hay with a new RISC advantage, power efficiency. We'll see...

    18. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by ozmanjusri · · Score: 1

      Yet that makes what happened even more strange. A long touted advantage of RISC was that because of its simplicity it could be clocked so much faster than CISC that doing less per instruction would still be faster net throughput. Yet what happened was that CISC (in the hands of Intel) could and did do and even outdo all the optimizations of RISC, including clock speed.

      As you say, the key advantage of RISC is simplicity and speed, but the tradeoff is software needs to be more complex to work around the simplified instruction set. Intel recognised the risk of RISC to their business early, particularly noting that there would be once-off cost to develop the microcode that would enable the switch to RISC, after which their x86 advantage would be lost.

      Cleverly, instead of trying to fight the RISC upstarts, Intel chose to develop the microcode themselves and enable it in hardware. They first implemented the decoder in their P6 architecture, which had the raw x86 instruction set on the surface (lots of complex instructions), but under the hood, it's all RISC with the decoder replacing those complex instructions with series of simpler instructions.

      So a x86 CPU works by having a quick and heavy-duty decoder in the frontend, which takes x86 instructions and converts them to an optimized internal format for the backend to process.

      What Intel has done is to settle on a fixed, stable CISC instruction format for the frontend, and a decoupled RISC backend they can tweak and modify to their heart's content without fear of losing compatibility. It's not quite the perfect solution, but with today's huge, complex CPU's, the decoder is a relatively small part of the silicon.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    19. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Growth Inflation = Loss.

    20. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Alioth · · Score: 1

      The x86 decoder is as large as an entire ARM execution core, and what's more it makes the pipeline and branch prediction a lot more complex with the variable length instructions so necessitates yet more complexity. From an asm point of view (and probably the compiler writer's point of view), a modern RISC processor is simpler to write software for than CISC, things like having all the ALU instructions taking 3 operands, having 32 registers that are truly general purpose (x86 still has some instructions that only work with certain registers) etc. RISC is a bit of a misnomer too. There are CISC chips with fewer instructions than some RISC chips, in reality RISC should be called load and store since that's the main differentiator: ALU instructions on RISC only work on registers and immediate values (which makes the chip a lot simpler to implement), whereas CISC chips often have all sorts of addressing modes for ALU instructions.

      --
      Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
    21. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by raxx7 · · Score: 1

      OS/2 was too advanced for the PC market of the time.
      OS/2 was something we take as granted now: a preemptive multi-tasking protected memory OS.
      But such an OS had drawbacks: it requires more memory, a bit more CPU and tends not to work well for old applications that were written to run on a bare metal "OS" like DOS.
      Although Microsft had one since 1993 (Windows NT), it was not until 2001 (Windows XP) that they were able to converge the PC market into using such an OS.

      IBM didn't abandon PowerPC, only a given market segment, that of desktop/laptop processors.
      Since Apple was the only customer for those processors, there was not enough money in it to fund competitive designs.
      Instead, IBM kept designing and producing PowerPC processors for other market segments: Wii/Wii U, Xbox360 and PS3 all use IBM PowerPC designs.
      They also have built a number of supercomputer based on PowerPC CPU designs. And of course, they keep making POWER CPUs for their servers.

    22. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      PowerPC is really a stripped down POWER processor, and modern PowerPC code can run on POWER architecture systems unmodified - it's machine language compatible.

      I don't think that's the case. Check Appendix F of IBM's "PowerPC User Instruction Set Architecture, Book I" and you will find a list of new PowerPC instructions that are not implemented in POWER.

      http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/systems/library/es-archguide-v2.html

    23. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by sribe · · Score: 1

      And yet they still seem to be doing fine.

      Uhm, no, they are NOT doing fine.

    24. Re:And yet IBM soldiers on... by pastafazou · · Score: 1

      Their revenue has stayed the same, but their profits and profit margin have consistently increased. Revenue growth is meaningless without also looking at how that growth affected profits. Lots of growth with little gain is a bad trend.

  12. Goodby Lotus 1-2-3.... by bobbied · · Score: 4, Funny

    Goodby Lotus 1-2-3 in 3 - 2 - 1.....

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  13. Notes? by JaySSSS · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now if they would only do the same with Notes!

    1. Re:Notes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hear Here!

    2. Re:Notes? by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 1

      But then what would I run on Novell NetWare???

    3. Re:Notes? by afidel · · Score: 1

      Groupwise, duh.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  14. IBM should open source it then by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:IBM should open source it then by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      because Microsoft would have a kitten fit.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    2. Re:IBM should open source it then by larien · · Score: 2

      I'd have thought that OpenOffice or LibreOffice have probably over taken it on functionality on a modern OS, so there's likely little real value in it. As for running on DOSBOX or similar, why bother?

    3. Re:IBM should open source it then by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2

      IBM has long been a contributor to openoffice and released Lotus Symphony based on it, so it's safe to assume they've brought the relevant parts over.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    4. Re:IBM should open source it then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Going AC here for obvious reasons.

      IBM didn't open source 1-2-3 (and the rest of SmartSuite) because of the extensive code cleanup needed, which had no ROI if IBM were going to just give it away. Occam's razor on that one. It lived as long as it did because a surprising number of customers were paying support. Many of them were still on OS/2 and had bought custom support extensions.

      Symphony was based on OpenOffice, not 1-2-3. It was forked in OO 2.1 I believe, where IBM added a bunch of UI changes (many to avoid MSFT patents), as well as partial macro compatibility with Excel. IBM contributed all changed code back when Sun->Oracle jettisoned OpenOffice out (a contentious process which also caused Libre Office to come into being). IBM is currently deprecating Symphony in favor of OpenOffice -- you can buy support contracts for it from IBM, which closes one big gap for enterprises looking for an Office alternative.

  15. Lotus 1-2-3 successor by StrangeBrew · · Score: 2

    Quattro Pro was the shiznits. Once it came out, Lotus 1-2-3 disappeared from our lab.

    1. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 successor by FlyingGuy · · Score: 2

      And then that cock sucker Jim Manzi decided if you can't beat them with your software, take the massive cash you have in the bank and suit them into bankruptcy IN Boston with a hand picked Judge all nice and paid for. To this day, if I see him I will hit him square in the nose as hard as I can and dance over him while he bleeds.

      Borland eventually won in court but not until after they had been bled of their cash to defend the suit and had sold Quattro of to Novell ( dumbest thing that Uncle Ray ever did perhaps except trusting Microsoft ) where it languished before being sold to Correl .

      --
      Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
    2. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 successor by n2505d · · Score: 1

      We learned spreadsheet basics on As Easy As 123. And same experience as above - once Quattro Pro came out, we used nothing else in the lab.

    3. Re:Lotus 1-2-3 successor by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      I think I still have a copy of that whole office suite.

  16. Why are the Republicans... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    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?

    1. Re:Why are the Republicans... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Idiot. Obama's been in office for 6 years. It is the Democrats oppressing us.

  17. Lotus killed their own cow several times by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    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.

    1. Re:Lotus killed their own cow several times by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "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."

      (Lotus) Symphony?

    2. Re:Lotus killed their own cow several times by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Improv. Introduced pivot tables and other innovations. Partners built businesses on it and when it was suddenly EOLed there was hell to pay with some of them.

  18. Point-end-down-point by kencurry · · Score: 1

    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)
  19. Probably some old guy retired or died by Eyezen · · Score: 2

    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

    1. Re:Probably some old guy retired or died by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OMG that's a great call. I could give you the guy's real name -- I actually liked him a lot, he was 1-2-3's living memory for years. But let's go with Milton because it works.

  20. Firs7 post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    a 7act: FreeBSD members' creative OF AMERICA) is the number of FrreBSD

  21. Lotus Improv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Lotus Improv by Frequency+Domain · · Score: 1

      I remember it, and loved it! A friend who invested heavily in Improv-related technology told me he found out (after losing his shirt) that Lotus had shut Improv down because it was eating into 1-2-3's market share, and they considered the latter their bread and butter product. So they ditched Improv, stuck with 1-2-3, and got their clocks cleaned by Microsoft.

  22. Why is greenwow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Totally incoherent today? And so full of hate? Probably off his meds again.

  23. Common Man Programmer by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Common Man Programmer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right - Macros were super cool. I remember writing simple macros linked to buttons I could drop on the spreadsheet and I could easily create mini applications for non technical users. Moving to Excel (including dropping the @ for the =) felt like a real loss of sophistication, and I have missed this powerful ease of use for the last 18 years!
      123 got me into the computer industry by providing an easy accessible platform for solving business problems. A shame to see it die

    2. Re:Common Man Programmer by clickclickdrone · · Score: 2

      Accountants and clerks did amazing programming using Lotus 1-2-3.

      I wrote a custom billing system for a bank. It had a master shell spreadsheet which then read in 300 odd data files from a mainframe listing transactions, one by one. Each customer file was parsed, the data processed into billing records which were written to another area of the sheet. Once all that was done, the bill templates were read in, again one by one, the addresses looked up, billing records turned into a charge schedule and the statements printed out. Took 30 hours to run the master macro on an IBM AT. We were the only people allowed to buy an AT, XTs were too slow. 286 - raw power.

      --
      I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
  24. memories... by xbytor · · Score: 1

    "Windows ain't done 'til Lotus don't run"

  25. um, Apple ][ ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're thinking of VisiCalc. 123 never ran on an Apple ][, I don't think.

  26. Well, double dumbass on you! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    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.

    1. Re:Well, double dumbass on you! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're an idiot if you think the Apple II was in any way "hipstery." The Mac era is when hipsters first became associated with Apple, typically in the design and publishing industries.

      The Apple II was strictly for hobbyists and schools. People used it in business, but it wasn't much of a "business computer." The IBM PC ate Apple's lunch in the corporate world despite it being a "Piece of Crap."

    2. Re:Well, double dumbass on you! by Mr+Z · · Score: 1

      I guess you never ran either an IBM PC XT or an Apple ][. Both were comparable in performance for many things. (A 1MHz 6502 pulls around 0.43 MIPS, while a 4.77MHz 8088 pulls about 0.35 MIPS.) And hipsters didn't arrive on the scene until the Second Coming of Steve Jobs.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    3. Re:Well, double dumbass on you! by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      For many things, yes. But the 8088 had a built in way to address more than 64KB of RAM (the CPU's limit was 1MB, but the IBM PC used some of the address space for I/O so the RAM limit on that platform was 640K), which gave it an edge for spreadsheets. Yes, it was convoluted; the segmented memory model was a pain. But it was better than nothing, or than a variety of inconsistent ad-hoc methods that 8 bit microcomputers acquired before they became obsolete.

    4. Re:Well, double dumbass on you! by Mr+Z · · Score: 1

      Oh, yeah, I definitely remember the pain of bank-switching vs. segmented memory. I was there and programmed both. It stunk.

      At least the Apple ][gs could directly address 16MB, although the 65816's addressing modes I hear were less than awesome. I must admit I never wrote any native 65816 code.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
  27. Just remember.... by Rick+Zeman · · Score: 1

    "...DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run."

  28. My first computer by Faux_Pseudo · · Score: 1

    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 &
  29. One down.. by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

    When are they going to kill Lotus Notes?

  30. Wordpro is still available internally by gelfling · · Score: 1

    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.

  31. Missing a Conversion Tool. by martiniturbide · · Score: 1

    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.

  32. Lotus Improv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    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.

  33. Even IBM didn't like using it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    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.