Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux

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264 pointsalexzeitler73 comments

Related. Others?

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31583982 - June 2022 (1 comment)

Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31455968 - May 2022 (83 comments)

Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316637 - March 2021 (123 comments)

Lotus 1-2-3 DOS Development Encyclopedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312681 - March 2021 (1 comment)

Lotus 1-2-3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26304542 - March 2021 (1 comment)

Rediscovering Lotus Agenda (MS-DOS, 1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343 - Oct 2020 (11 comments)

> article documenting how it is possible here

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html

From there, a site to someone who was

> a sysop [system operator] in the 90s BBS [Bulletin Board Service] scene

https://scenelist.org/

> article documenting how it is possible here

Best line on that page:

"It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me!"

Yeah, the humour of the author is pretty enjoyable.

The tool written to redefine symbols in a COFF file is called "coffsyrup" :) https://github.com/taviso/123elf/blob/main/coffsyrup.c

This is beyond impressive. I wish my hacking skills stretched as far as resurrecting dead software on alien platforms.

This article https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html is a pure joy to read

This is a stunning achievement from a technical point of view. Bravo! Is there any company that still owns the intellectual property of Lotus (and care about stuff like this)?

I always liked Lotus 1-2-3. It was the first spreadsheet I ever used and it was quite useful. The biggest downside from the pre-graphical versions was charting/graphs and printing. However, for run-of-the-mill spreadsheet usage it was quite nice. I might have to give this a spin.

edit: Did give it a spin and I now have it running on Debian. Impressive!

Lotus software still exists as a subsidiary of HCLTech, an Indian IT company. They acquired it from IBM. While it was still owned by IBM, 1-2-3 was officially discontinued in 2014.

Legally, HCLTech probably still owns the rights to it, but since it hasn't been for sale for years, I would consider it abandonware and would not have many qualms about pirating it, especially as this is a port of "Release 3", from 1989.

Lotus Notes: so painful even IBM didn't want it anymore.

PwC (big 4 financial auditing-side) used to be a mostly LN shop.

I remember LN on OS/2 ran the backoffice of a US nationwide retail software chain.

If you don't know VisiData, you should give it a look. It's basically a modern version of Lotus 1-2-3 for the terminal.

https://www.visidata.org/

I’ve never used Lotus 1-2-3 so I can’t speak for the comparison, but VisiData is really awesome. I find it much easier than Excel for quick sorting and filtering, but its power goes far beyond that.

It's an amazing story really, this project. And, what was it about the word "lotus" back then; surely the name-as-meme bore some tremendous global significance and possibly world-horoscope-level weight. It was kind of a powerful word.

And I mean James Bond was even in on it.

I do look at the graphics with a bit of longing curiousity though...I wonder if I could get Lotus SmartSuite for Windows 95 running again, just to try it for nostalgia.

SmartSuite was bundled with one of my first PCs (toward the end of the days when the word lotus was still kinda cool), and I still remember looking at the blank agenda (and even the paper binder-planner skeuomorphism in Organizer) and full office launcher, and just taking in the raw organizing power of those tools...a real "where do you want to go today (TM)" feeling!

("I'll play Jane's USNF for a couple hours and then eat cereal for dinner" never felt quite right to fill in on the agenda, but that turned out to be where I wanted to go today, on so many days back then)

> And I mean James Bond was even in on it.

What's the reference?

I'm guessing it's a reference to the amphibious Lotus Esprit car used in the film The Spy Who Loved Me[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Esprit#In_film_and_on_te...

> I wonder if I could get Lotus SmartSuite for Windows 95 running again, just to try it for nostalgia.

I've tried it on Win11. The whole suite worked perfectly but with 1 big caveat: Win11 no longer understands the old Help file format. So, no online help. Big snag.

SmartSuite 9.8 was the last edition:

https://winworldpc.com/product/lotus-smartsuite/9-8

With the fixpak to take it to 9.8.6.1, that is the final ever release.

Cool that you even tried it! I was considering trying it out in Wine since I've had some dumb luck when it's configured to run as various past versions of Windows. Maybe a long shot though.

A Register reader asked me how to run 1-2-3 on modern Windows, after I wrote this:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/friday_foss_fest_runn...

This seemed the easiest way, and so it was. I told them how to do it; no reply.

:-(

IIRC Smartsuite was also supported on OS/2 and so it should be "clean" and will probably work well on WINE.

I worked for Lotus in the 90s as a systems engineer for a port of Lotus 123 for IBM mainframes.

My territory was mainly scandanavian countries, due to a go getter salesman in that region, so I got to see that part of the world on expenses and do really interesting tech. What a time.

Cool! Was that for MVS or VM (or both)? I imagine there were a lot of challenges adapting it to work well in a 3270 environment.

From memory MVS/XA - but it was so long ago I wouldn't bet on it. I do remember it was a great offering, though soon overshadowed by the new hotness that was Lotus Notes.

> though soon overshadowed by the new hotness that was Lotus Notes.

The fun thing about that statement is I have no idea whether it was sarcastic or heartfelt. I have never found a more polarizing piece of software in my long career. It’s a love or hate there and doesn’t seem to be any “meh” opinion. (I was in the hate camp and thankfully my life has been Notes free for over 15 years)

I feel Notes was a lot like 123. Immensely flexible and you could build anything in it. But the end results were a hairball that you'd never want dropped in your lap to maintain.

I hated notes but loved 123, I was even one of those weird slash key users of excel after we did the big MS switch for a whole lot longer than I should have been.

Ray Ozzie shows up here occasionally. I disparaged Notes a while back and he set me straight - the backend is pretty elegant. However the front end was designed to be cross-platform and as a result is a lowest common denominator UI. It's not attractive, but it worked nearly everywhere. Since that is what people see, that's the impression they get.

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18320592

I’ll admit to just being a front end user of the platform only so I am sure it framed my opinion—the UX was dreadful. The other thing that set the bad taste it was brought in as the corporate email platform by a company that acquired us and since I lead IT for our org (now a division) and corporate IT was across country and 3 hours behind, we caught the brunt of all the user complaints and support for the first half of the day until the help desk opened up.

Lotus Notes is criminally underrated. I don't think folks gave credit to the replication engine. I was so stoked when Ray O was going to MS and thought he'd just kill it there, and I prayed bring Lotus like replication to sharepoint. I was not a huge notes fan early on as the UI was off-putting (I didn't know the UI was written to be cross platform - now it makes sense). But the functionality it provided and the millions of notes DBs written, is truly amazing and it has a huge place of respect in my book. Ray is tops in my book.

The best description of Lotus Notes I ever heard was "It's like using Microsoft Access with VBA as your email client and calendar". (Plus random forms and "applications" that should have been on the web instead.)

I built notes database applications a while back in may career. It’s kinda a no sql data store with clunky front end (cross platform as mentioned elsewhere) and lotus script.

After working in it for a while I’d start to notice the Notes email and calendar are just specialized notes applications. It’s not the best..

Notes preceded the web by many years.

At some point in time there was something called Domino (or more precisely Lotus Domino Server).

Basically it was a server for Lotus Notes solutions. You could flick a switch, and then you turned your Notes-based solutions into web-applications.

It seems it still exists in some form: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/hcl_domino_12_debuts/

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

You were retrofit your idea back to one of the integrated idea sharing platform, with security, ease of programming (by user and not IT guys like us) … I still do not see any close to it thing even today.

The product itself was for both MVS and VM/CMS - https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ss...

But possibly MVS customers outnumbered VM/CMS ones to the point that you rarely or never worked with any of the later

What a blast from the past, thanks. From memory VM/CMS use was mostly internal and most of my customers at least were on MVS. VM was mighty fine.

Company I worked for switched from Lotus Notes to Office365 7-8 years ago. The email client was decent but weird, which was a lot better than Microsofts. And the chat client actually worked, unlike Lync for business (chat on multiple devices was completely broken).

Main reason for switching was that it was going to pay for itself, as Notes was expensive. But we also had hundreds of applications in Notes with no replacement plan or budget to do so, so they barely got rid of any licenses.

I'm surprised there isn't someone, somewhere with the OG source code for Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect or TurboPascal. So much lost knowledge in those old apps.

Fun read. I'm pretty sure there were ways to run SCO SysV binaries unmodified on Linux (and I think FreeBSD and others), back in the day. Maybe something to do with ibcs2?

Back in the day, I ran native SCO binaries on Linux, but you needed the SCO shared libraries for most apps, and those were definitely not open source.

The bsd binary compatibility system was an interesting effort to allow executeable files built for other systems to run on bsd, I never actually used it but my understanding is it was always hard to set up and fragile.

OpenBSD removed it as they did not feel they could properly maintain the system.

FreeBSD keeps a little of it around, mainly to run linux binaries.

NetBSD it looks like they kept the whole buffet.

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/compat.html

BSD = Berkeley Software/System Distro.

iBCS = Intel Binary Compatibility Standard. iBCS2 = iBCS v2.

Not the same thing or even related.

... but the BSDs did have support for SystemV binaries, through modules compat_svr4 and compat_ibcs2, so the grand parent comment made perfect sense to me. Not sure why there were two and I don't plan to go down that rabbit hole today, but perhaps due to SVR4 vs SVR3 differences, and ELF vs COFF, shrug.

Fair point! I am not so familiar with them, but I am sure you're right.

iBCS2 - https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2809. As another comment indicated, this worked as the syscall layer rather than at the library layer, so the kernel would translate the expected responses - but this meant that you needed libraries that expected the SVR4-style responses, which means having to find a copy of the appropriate libc and so on as well instead of being able to use the Linux libc.

I started digging into this because that's basically the sort of person I am, and hit https://ibcs-us.sourceforge.io/ which implements iBCS2 in userland, including a COFF loader. In theory, with that you should be able to run the unmodified Lotus 1-2-3 binary, as long as you have the corresponding SVR3 or whatever userland available for it.

Since there are now native x86-32 binaries, I don't see much point.

But there was a native MS Word for Xenix. I installed that on several production systems. It offers easier file interchange with modern word processors, and it was a bit easier to use. Less powerful than WP 7, but also less arcane.

I'd love to see that running again.

I remember my boss managed to make Oracle 7 running on FreeBSD via iBCS. I was told, CNN did that, too for their web site back in nineties.

Lurking around for text based spreadsheets for Linux, brought this one which can import/export xls and xlsx, use GNUPlot for graphing and Lua for scripting.

https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

Already packaged in Debian and Alpine, possibly others.

It is fairly nice from a preservation perspective.

And a shame that software this old hasn't been released as open source by its owners, thus this cannot be used in any meaningful way.

The author of this port has written about how it was done. They have found enough debug data to do a full decompilation I think.

Yes, I have read the link in the top of the readme in the repo about the methodology.

It is fairly cool.

Still, it is unrelated to Open Source, which isn't about having source code or the like, but about licensing.

OSI's Open Source definition is more or less the same as GNU's four freedoms.

According to https://github.com/taviso/123elf/issues/105 there is no real chance for getting a FOSS license here.

Yes, I understand this is all done w/o the original code owners' permission.

It is sad we have to walk on eggshells with code from the 80s. Copyright terms really are a mess.

Tavis is an absolute gem and everything they do falls in the very small "good computer thing" bucket

Him and Fabrice Bellard. Great engineers!

Lotus Notes (the email system) is still in active use by some organizations. IBM sold it to HCLTech in 2019:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/notes/8.5.3?topic=help-welcome-l...

https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/our-point-view-ibm-websphere-c...

Perhaps somebody at one of those two organizations would still have the LPL, compiler and SDK?

IBM sold a lot of shit to HCL in 2019. My $WORK at the time was renegotiating the contracts with them to keep their Campaign and Interact (low/no-code marketing lead processing tools, clunky-ass flowchart UI) instances supported.

They removed the last DOS related code from Lotus Notes in 2007.

Since then, it's based on Eclipse.

I have a customer still on Notes. They have a whole big CRM and sales planning system built in it so they have a degree of lock in. It's kind of modern ish with an iOS app (HCL Verse) and 2FA. Works for them.

I thought 1-2-3 for Linux was sc [1]...

[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699

sc is a SuperCalc clone. SuperCalc was a CP/M-based spreadsheet app that pre-dated Lotus 1-2-3.

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

Yep. I remember CA SuperCalc for DOS. It seemed to be more advanced.

SuperCalc was even older, but it got developed further.

Lotus twice dropped the ball with 1-2-3. It is the killer app that made the IBM PC a hit, meaning hand-coded assembler.

The company rewrote v3 in C. Bigger, slower, needed more RAM. So, they used one of the 1st ever DOS extenders that allowed a DOS app to be bigger than 640 kB.

Sadly they picked one incompatible with the hot new thing, Windows 3.0.

2nd screw up: they missed the GUI boat, because they guessed where to jump too early and got it wrong: they ported it to OS/2, which flopped, instead of to Windows 3...

The double Lotus screwup allowed the competition chances.

SuperCalc evolved into the first true 3D spreadsheet for the PC. CA bought the company and sold it for a bargain $50 or something, a tenth of the rivals' prices, so it became a very late DOS hit.

Borland developed Quattro, a graphical spreadsheet app for DOS. That is where Excel's stretch-a-box-to-autofill feature came from: stolen from Quattro.

It's still sold as part of WordPerfect Office today.

Related note, I was fascinated by Lotus Improv after seeing it in "Popular Computing World" magazine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

One of the Lotus founders / early employees, I was on a European bike tour and cruise with the guy about 2015. I'm trying to remember his name. He was legally blind but still rode a bike just fine, didn't crash, and had a great time.

I wonder if there was ever a Unix version of Lotus Agenda? It was a database/organizer from that era that my father still uses to this day for every last bit of his notekeeping (these days, in DOSbox on Win10). There was a project called "Chandler" that was intended to build a modern clone, but it seems to have gone nowhere.

My dad's frustration with Windows 10 is starting to boil over, and while DOSbox runs just fine on Linux, a (semi-)native version would be better.

Mention of Chandler triggered a memory of a book.

"Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg. Dives into the history of the Chandler project. ISBN 978-1-4000-8247-6. I don't know if I agree with the blurb on the back that it's a successor to Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine", but I remember it being an interesting read.

Sorry, doesn't help with your Agenda problem.

Agenda is legal freeware now.

https://www.old-games.com/download/5737/lotus-agenda-2-0

Runs on DOSemu2:

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/lotusagenda.html

The user documentation in the wiki is great!

https://github.com/taviso/123elf/wiki/Getting-Started

My first spreadsheet. And it was an eye opener. I think this was the first time I truly appreciated the power "behind he curtain" of computers.

Very cool. Peak Lotus 123 will always be the cartridge form for the PCJr which was prob the only great thing about that blighted machine.

That machine taught me Wordstar... but I agree, otherwise, it was a mess.

I will make it live online by integrating it into extendedmachine.com, my new operating system running in a web browser

What about VIP Professional??

No 1-2-3 for BSD?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com