Stuff like this is so cool, and also highlights the importance of archiving the internet.<p>I've never used Lotus 1-2-3, but this makes me want to try and get it running to try out older software that is brutally efficient.
I think there is something kind of fun about purposefully using "outdated" software, and even valuable sometimes, in the same way that it's useful to use a dead language like Latin nowadays; it's not changing so there's sort of a bit of "equality" to it, for want of a better word.<p>For example, I've actually thought it might make sense for people to release new software on DOS or the Sega Genesis, simply because they're not being updated anymore, and as a result, there's a ton of great emulators for both that can run on pretty much any modern platform under the sun. A Linux program I write might not run under FreeBSD or AmigaOS, but I would bet that I could get basically nearly any SNES game running nearly flawlessly on them with an emulator.
Reminds me of the HP 200LX that came with full version of Lotus 1-2-3 v2.4. Quite a powerful computer to run off of two AA batteries.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX</a><p>I still feel there's things it could do that I can't do with my iPhone; and spreadsheets is one of them. (Yes you can get Excel on an iPhone, the interface sucks).
Patience exhibited by the author is incredible. These days I get angry after maybe an hour or two of running into one issue after another—because I know that their supply is pretty much endless, while victories over unreasonable software begin to feel smaller and rather meh.
Fascinating, I was a kid but just old enough to remember trying out this kind of DOS software and reading Norton's book as well.<p>However, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a "modern" terminal floss office suite. There are a number of projects, but they are scattered:<p><a href="https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/115548" rel="nofollow">https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/115548</a>
You should try to find SCO Professional.. It was a 1-2-3 clone for UNIX/Xenix that I think used curses or at least termcap. It worked quite well in an SCO Xenix-based office I maintained in the early 90s.<p>So this was a single 386 machine with a large card that supported multiple hercules graphics card eqivalents as daughter boards. Terminals included a keyboard and monitor connected to this card over RS-485. A single 386 supported four users this way.<p>Here is an ad for it:<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=LVCsAZClkfUC&pg=PT453&lpg=PT453&dq=unterminal+vna+advanced+micro+research&source=bl&ots=SEbvYIIMhk&sig=ACfU3U0Pi0Vi69U8Dma4q5BTnoxwOncmuA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjM0pydv5LvAhXGEVkFHfC9ALIQ6AEwCHoECAoQAw#v=onepage&q=unterminal%20vna%20advanced%20micro%20research&f=false" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/books?id=LVCsAZClkfUC&pg=PT453&lpg=...</a><p>It ran SCO Professional, Real World Accounting and a custom database. There was no TCP/IP.<p>This system replaced the previous Radio Shack model 16-based system. That one ran RM/COS and had several serial port terminals.
This reminds me I should try to make a bit more progress with trying to write an RDP display driver for Win9x... one of those things I thought of one day but never really got around to doing. (I'm sure there are existing solutions, but writing my own is half the fun --- and I've already written a generic VESA framebuffer.)<p>I like stuff like this in the same ways as car modding --- teaching an old dog new tricks.
This is freaking awesome!<p>I mostly stick to GUI era software, and find Word 97 to be amazing for writing.<p>I run it inside a VM rather than using Wine.
Amazing story.<p>Can't believe the Lotus FTP site is still live. Wonder where that thing is running and if anyone actually knows it still is.<p>> I was able to find the drivers on an old ftp site.<p>Wonder what FTP site this is and how he found it?
It takes a certain kind of puzzle curiosity to do this sort of thing. I find I would have re-written Lotus 1-2-3 from scratch rather than do all this but that is just another way of spending one's "cleverness beans" as they used to say.<p>People with this level of curiosity and puzzle affinity make great security researchers/staff. In their own way older binaries are all puzzle boxes that are holding some number of exploitable vulnerabilities to make them do things that their original developer either didn't intend or didn't foresee. Finding them gives a dopamine hit.
On the DOS post on Lotus from Taviso, maybe he would like
Groff + Mom + a Makefile entr watching for the file changes (and running make) with MuPDF refreshing the content automatically.<p>Far lighter than LaTeX, and almost as user-friendly as the
old word processors.
People might also be interested in sc (spreadsheet calculator): <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)</a>
This is awesome.<p>Could a js transpilation of a dos emulator be used to get this to run well in a browser? It would be cool to have a text mode spreadsheet that works in a browser and could be self hosted.
A bit off topic, but what I've wanted forever and never found is a spreadsheet that deals in units natively. So if one cell is in Newtons and I divide it by a cell that is in m/s^2 I want the resulting cell to be in grams. Units should propagate through the sheet automatically. Unit prefixes can either be automatic (km, m, mm, um, etc) or fixed as you would with a format setting.<p>Google calculator is the closest thing I've seen to this, but it isnt in spreadsheet form.<p>Anyone know of a system that provides this functionality?