Mitch Kapor Introduces Lotus 1-2-3 Spreadsheet (1983) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Mitch Kapor Introduces Lotus 1-2-3 Spreadsheet (1983) [video]

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121 pointsohjeez30 comments

My father in the 80s was working at GE where he extensively used Lotus 1-2-3. He loved it so much that he bought a computer in 85 and used to use it at home as well. I always hated the boring blue and black screen.

We moved back to Pakistan in early 90s and we setup a small girls school. He used Lotus to keep track of all students, results, late fees, accounts etc. It required a lot of data entry but he absolutely loved that he could get required data in seconds. All the fellow owners of schools were super fascinated.

It took quite a while for him to shift to Excel later as he was super comfortable with Lotus. Pretty sure before his death deep down he still preferred Lotus over Excel

this is so wholesome.

In the late 90's I was doing a lot of IT work as a college student. One of my clients was an accounting firm that was still on a Novell Netware network. All of their apps were ancient terminal-based programs. Lotus 123 was one of the most important. I switched them over to a Linux server and NT workstations. The nightmare of getting captured LPT ports and print-servers configured to emulate Netware-style print queues was enough for me to lose it most days. Finally I asked, "why not just use MS Excel?" Then I watched one of the accountants. He completely flew around Lotus in a way that was inspiring. I imagine forcing him to learn a new tool would have introduced one heck of a hinderance to his daily grind. To this day, I have a serious affinity for CLI apps because of how well that team was able to zip through their work.

One of the most noteworthy things about Mitch Kapor is that he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The EFF seemed to be informed and motivated by an understanding of technology, as well as of history, and progressive American ideals of society/humanity (freedom of speech, civil rights, innovation, etc.).

I was only a teen at the time, but I got the T-shirt: an EFF retro "Radio Free Internet" radio tower design.

This was just before the Web, when the Internet and other emerging information technology was something people wanted to nurture and defend, and bring to everyone.

When the dotcom valuations started, the influx of money, and of people with less context and vision, had us acting like unfavorable stereotypes of MBA students for a long time.

But it seems the EFF hit its stride, and has been keeping it real.

I'll suggest the book Dreaming in Code to anyone who wants to learn more about the history of Mitch Kapor and Lotus, particularly what went wrong with their attempt at "revolutionary" calendar software Chandler.

http://www.dreamingincode.com/book-excerpt/

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/

It's a great read, but also deeply frustrating. I can feel in my bones what they're aiming for — I loved Agenda, and the idea of Notes is a brilliant one too, but it seems so frustratingly hard to actually deliver a great product that delivers on it.

(It's also very easy to criticise Chandler's approach with hindsight, but the book does a good job of making you appreciate just how much was up in the air at that point with approaches to building networked applications: see for example the amount of effort they poured into making it work locally because the idea of constantly having to chat back to a central server was anathema to them)

I share your frustration, and I have nothing but admiration for Mitch Kapor -- he would go on to be one of the founders of the EFF after all.

For me, what causes me the most pain in hindsight is how easily we could have ended up in a world where Lotus, with its ethically conscious leadership, could have ended up with the degree of influence on the digital landscape that Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook would eventually have over the digital world. Just a few million better spent dollars and a few more groundbreaking products shipped, and who knows...

My dad once told me a story how in the 80's he was a manager in an engineering division and wrote up a big spec for a computer system that he wanted IT to develop that would 'solve all their problems' on these newfangled personal computers, with ideas from his earlier exposure to mainframes.

So he gave the spec to the IT manager and described what he wanted. When he finished explaining, the IT manager looked at him puzzled and asked "So you want Lotus?"

"Sort 1000 names in 14 seconds"

I never fully used Lotus, but I gave it a chance back then when I was in college. I did all my college work on Quattro Pro for D.O.S 5 and 6 along with WordStar and later with WordPerfect in Windows. I've used Quattro Pro in Windows later on too. Ah, those good old days.

Quattro Pro was a pretty kick ass spreadsheet for a DOS app (graphs, printing etc), I didn't like going back to 1-2-3 after that.

Yeah I loved the graphs. My geography teacher also was amazed to the point my work is stored in the library of my school.

Lotus was my introduction to “programming”. It opened my eyes to what a computer could do. I don’t think it was turing complete and certainly wasn’t intended to be. But spreadsheets are the one program that exposes the power of these wonderful machines to the average person.

I thought you could do loops in macros, which is part of being turing complete.

Nope. The first Lotus macro/formula language version that allowed loops was in Notes and Domino 6. Before that, you needed to use Lotusscript (a dialect of Basic similar to Visual Basic for Applications) or a C API to loop, and that came along with Windows versions and OLE.

Lotus 1-2-3 had for loops from the beginning, version one even, far before notes, domino, lotusscript, Windows or OLE/DDE existed. Here is a manual for version two, page 126 describes the {for} loop.

This wasn’t some hidden feature, lotus macro language was essential to its success from the beginning and was widely used for automating batch processing.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/117872648/Lotus-1-2-3-v2-3-Functi...

Dataflow/reactive is also one the most addictive model. I'm sure everybody loves when a spreadsheet refreshes everything.

I know that's a trait I ran after all my life. Including my love for dag based CGI tools and to a point, lisp repls.

When I got started in IT in the mid-90's, it was working for an accountancy office. Lotus 1-2-3 was absolutely the main tool that was used.

The move to Excel happened, due to the simple fact that with every Gateway PC we bought as we upgraded from DOS based machines to Windows 95 ones, they were giving away Office Pro for free.

The love of free (as in beer) software was enough to move people from 1-2-3 to Excel, even though Excel wasn't as good or as stable back then.

1-2-3 was way too expensive for me back when I was in graduate school, so I used a shareware clone called 'As Easy As'[1] for the calculations required for my thesis. It worked great.

It's too bad console-based spreadsheets have fallen out of favor. I still find them useful for doing quick calculations when using a terminal. My go-to spreadsheet console app these day is 'sc', which is still available in all the standard linux repositories. An improved version, sc-im, has multi-level undo and color support, and is available on github [2] .

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Easy-As [2] - https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

About 7 or 8 years ago, the city of Cambridge publicly celebrated the opening of an innovation plaza next to the Kendall Red Line stop. They had sidewalk plaques of innovators, some of whom were on hand to accept the honor. Kapor was one of them. I can't remember what he said, but what did stick with me was a respectable group of Lotus alumni who showed up to applaud him, many wearing Lotus jackets or other company attire. It was like a cult - they were obviously very tight and loyal to him and the company, even though it was long gone by then.

Love visicalc but multiplan more. 1-2-3 is just work.

No love for Lotus Jazz?

It's a shame the audio is so bad. Would love me a polished version...

Oh that's your new side project right there: a browser plugin that does this on the fly. With ai. And put something something block chain in for the 2017 retro vibes ;)

There's a massive business for audio correction on the web. I find it almost hysterical to have a 1080p conference video with a blurry slide and a dark speaker and cannot hear clearly. Radio is a better medium.

I’m interested in presentation detection and enhancement in general. For example, if a person is standing in front of a mostly static chalkboard for an hour, there is a ton of information there about the writing on the board. The frames could be fed into a handwriting detector and perhaps vectorized, and the video format should understand this and transmit a full resolution chalkboard on frame zero of the transmission, and not send any board info until there is an actual modification.

Interesting how far spreadsheets have come since 1983 and, just as interesting, how much presentation tools and techniques have changed in the same time period!

Presentation tools have changed much more than spreadsheets. Mid-80s Lotus 1-2-3 is perfectly adequate for anything I use a spreadsheet for today given I don’t use pivot tables or macros.

By contrast, presentation software in Windows (and to some degree Mac) was fundamentally different. Various DOS and other programs of the same era were basically just a way to create some bullet points and graphs. Functional but not much more.

A lot of what makes Excel fantastic are the quality of life changes. The data capabilities, the formatting options, the formula auditing. Simply being able to convert to table is a absolute massive time saver.

For a look at this, checkout the book Sweating Bullets by the creator of Powerpoint: https://amzn.to/2IOfGE9

legend

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