Lotus 1-2-3

I think about this a lot when I see UI redesigns that "look fresh" or "updated" while actually reducing productivity and degrading the life of the humans who need computers to get stuff done. All for some vague concept from the head of a "visionary" who often doesn't use the system to solve the problems it is meant to solve.

It has nothing to do with software design decisions and everything to do with a cost/benefit equation in the mind of someone with one foot out the door. I’ve seen this with senior DBA’s and CEOs alike. They are not objectively good judges of “what works” for anyone except themselves because of this huge conflict of interest.

I sincerely believe you see the same thing with the elderly at a certain point - I’ve known a few people that after like 85 have zero interest and feel zero compulsion to “stay on top of” new ways of doing things, whether it’s software, vehicles, whatever. They’ve got enough skills to make it out and why trouble yourself with stuff that doesn’t matter?

I understand it, but am not sure it’s wise for a retiree. For instance, Excel may come in handy for that guy doing budget planning or contracting gigs later.

Add to that, the further behind you slide with technology, the harder it is to catch back up. You miss out on integrating the models, paradigms, and affordances, and a couple gens of compounding evolution happen without you and the learning curve becomes much steeper than it needs to be. It’s like keeping your house clean by doing little bits frequently rather than massive efforts rarely.

I was at a farmers once and got talking to his wife about Lotus and she showed me what she had built. She had a few boxes of software and books above her desk. The Lotus 123 box looked different than mine and found out she had version 1, not version 1A like the overwhelming majority that were sold.

I told her to never throw away that box and disks because sometime in the distant future she had a relatively rare collectors item. She laughed and said with my luck a competitor will come along and no one will ever want a rare copy. She may have been right.

My maternal grandfather-in-law recounts that he said the same thing when he was close to retirement, but regrets it badly today. The skills someone was trying to teach him, it turns out, would have been very valuable skills also in retirement.

I know this because my dad ran Quattro Pro, a Lotus 1-2-3 competitor up until around 2020 (he finally retired but still might use it for other reasons) and we had to keep figuring out how to keep it working over the years.

Two AA batteries power it for a least a month; you could recharge NiMH with the built-in charger if you wanted. I use the PCMCIA card slot to hold a battery-backed SRAM, allowing complete backup (via automatic macros) of the entire machine (dead main batteries are not killers, here in the pre-FLASH world).

And, the comm -- you can plug a special cable in to get 115,200 serial port. And you have IrDA --- I wrote the very first IrDA-compatible 'stack' on that machine (and at the time sold compatible discrete IrDA HW, so you could attach to another end, e.g. a PC).

Sorry to highjack a 1-2-3 thread with praise for the HP 200 LX, but that was (is) one HELL of an awesome machine, still in use in my lab to this day.

Work for a few years in the finance or insurance industry, and this opinion of yours will likely change: people in these industries have a tendency to (ab)use functionalities of modern Excel a lot. :-)

Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35807639 - May 2023 (73 comments)

Also related:

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)

Software was expensive back then, too, many hundreds of dollars that you really really wanted to keep running.

It wasn’t until the mid 90s when PCs started to feel like the more capable platform.

It’s also worth noting that there is a reason Microsoft offers heavy subsidies for education: it’s because if you indoctrinate people into your platform early on then they’re likely to keep buying your platform for years to come because change is scary.

Edit: just to add some context, this is the point of view from England. Sounds like Apple had (and possibly still has?) a bigger presence in schools in the US. Whereas over here Apple machines were relatively uncommon compared to many of their counterparts.

The main way to transfer files in the 80s was floppy disks. Most PCs in the 80s had only 5.25" floppies, and Macs had 3.5". Even if you had a 3.5" drive though on your PC, the Mac had a much different format. There was some software that let you read Mac disks on a PC, but it was somewhat flakey, and then you were left with the fact that the base file format on the Mac with resource and data forks was much different, and then of course you were probably using different spreadsheet and word processing software. Overall it was just barely possible to share files if you really worked at it.

What you tended to see was that most everyone used PCs except certain industries/jobs that needed the graphical capabilities of the Mac. For example, if you were in a newsroom, everyone would be using Macs because there really wasn't good desktop publishing software for the PC until about the early nineties.

The Amiga had a niche in video production because there really wasn't anything comparable to the video toaster for the Mac or PC until much later. You'd also see various types of workstations used for CAD, and in the nineties, SGI was the only game in town for high end 3D graphics. Hardly anyone bought a NeXT because they were so expensive and therefore didn't have enough software. They were pretty good for rapidly developing GUI software though, so there were a few companies, specifically banks, that used some of them for internally developed software.

1. GUIs were mostly pretty terrible back then. Yes, even on a Mac. You can't tell from screenshots, but GUIs were incredibly slow and clunky for daily use.

2. Clone PCs were much more affordable at a time when the cost of a computer was very high relative to now. When adjusting for inflation, a decent computer then would be $7,000-$8,000 in 2023 dollars.

But remember that the people who use computers aren't the people buying those computers. They're purchased by the boss, and the boss isn't going to spend a single dollar for a better user experience, much less the hundreds or thousands it would have cost. This still applies today to enterprise software.

I can only speak for me, but perhaps others feel the same way. It is nostalgia for me because this is the first way I experienced a computer, when everything was new to me and anything was possible. Until we got a computer, the only window outside of the world of my city was a TV, but a computer ran software of all sorts, and games, and others knew how it worked and could teach me stuff. Then the Internet came and I could talk to people anywhere in the world! What a thing this was.

Now, I spend all day looking at screens. I get paid to make them work, and that's cool, but the wonder and magic of it all is gone, and I miss it. DOS and text apps just happened to be my first interface, and everyone longs for their first love.

On a slightly more tactical angle, I really like typing and my keyboard, and terminal apps make it so I don't have to move my hands to a mouse and change contexts. A small thing, but it adds up. Yes, some stuff is easier with a mouse, but it's always fun to not have to change between input devices for long stretches of time.

Plus almost anyone could write programs, I saw some amazing programs created as COM files.

I’m not using any of those other old things you mention, but I love how I can run my full Emacs-configuration locally in a TTY, remotely over SSH or whatever with no loss of functionality.

Having that capability is IMO a strength, not a weakness, and I wish more software was like that.

Nowadays, our computers have instant access to an uncountable amount of storage, information, and software through the Internet, and even local storage is enormous. Back then, the world was much smaller; the software and data you had in your small hard disk and boxes of floppy disks (and perhaps tape, etc.) was all that you had, and you didn't have a constantly online network to distract you with an unlimited fire hose of nonstop information.

That led to a closer relationship between you and the software on your computer. You had time to explore each and every corner of the software, and to read its manual (be it in the form of an online help or a paper book) from cover to cover. The software stayed the same; there was no automatic online update, no security scare blaming you for staying on a release that's more than a day old. You knew your software and hardware limitations, and adapted to them; they would stay the same until you bought more hardware, or new software (which came in colorful physical boxes, that you could put on a shelf).

We have gained much since, but lost some of that sense of wonder, of making the most of memory and storage measured in megabytes or even kilobytes, processors with speeds measured in megahertz or even kilohertz, and displays with few lines and columns of characters and little color.

For me, I use these tools in my daily life because the normal internet is just too damn noisy and gamified and addicting. I'm big on the slow internet movement and browsing the internet in w3m is a huge boon to focusing on what really matters: the words.

I AM AMAZED that the average Pascal program of the day compiled faster on my old 386 than the average program compiles today in the latest and greatest workstation. Also don't get me started on cloud remote desktops. Go compare the immediacy of this garbage vs an old DOS computer in most applications.

About the UI... Dozens of flashing buttons, toasts and pings vs a Zen interface where you can, well, just focus on work.

Then you will understand why George R.R. Martin wrote all the Game of Thrones books on his elderly Wordstar DOS PC, and will not touch a GUI.

Since it is ported to Linux, you could run it remotely over ssh over slow and high latency connections with no issue. It also opens and operates instantly on any computer you can find.

The nostalgia is mostly about seeing what was possible withing limited hardware, and realizing we could do better with less.

You could write 20% of it in a few days, maybe 50% in a month, but that last bit would take … thousands of man hours.