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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
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
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.
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.
Ugh notes. That deserves a trigger warning...
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.
The trigger is on the Killbots equipped with Lotus Notes and a machine gun...they are the finest available.
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.
"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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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 &
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!
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
The internet really is home to the worse perversions...
When are they going to kill Lotus Notes?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!