“The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC’s killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3’s day is done.” Impressive 30 year run.
I’ve always wondered why IBM kept the suite when they were abandoning the fat client.
This matches the continuous abandoning of “foreign” brand names, such as it happened to Lotus Notes, now IBM Notes — yes, it still sucks. 🙂
http://techland.time.com/2012/11/20/lotus-farewell-to-a-once-great-…
Lotus Notes:
The only piece of software that makes you think exchange is a good idea.
Back in the dark ages, I was defacto Head Tech guy for a small non for profit. We had a new president that came in, and kind of demanded we use Lotus Notes. I showed him the pricing of what that would take close to 10% of our overall revenue ( again small, small non for profit) . He quit the job before he could order me to do it, thank God.
Lotus Notes is proof satan exists.
Am I the only one that is surprised it’s even for sale still? At $352.00 I can assume they haven’t been exactly flying off the shelf.
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/123
My experience: Quattro Pro was better in DOS, Excel better in Windows.
Nope… I’d assumed they were dead at least decade ago… this is the first time I’ve head them mentioned in a long time.
Lotus Word Pro 96 was a much nicer word processor than MS Word 2-10 ever was (IMO, Word 2003 was when it finally became usable). LWP didn’t survive the transition from Win3.x to Win9x, though.
However, WordPerfect has them all beat, especially when it comes to file format compatibility (you can open WordPerfect 14 documents in WordPerfect 7 without issues).
Never used 1-2-3, but my mom swore by it, especially in the DOS days. WP and 1-2-3 were all she needed for running the offices she worked in. She still uses WP, but has switched to Quattro Pro since it comes with the WP suite.
RIP Colin Chapman
The sad irony is that IBM’s Lotus became the exact opposite of Colin Chapman’s philosophy of first simplify then add lightness.
I personally don’t see much difference between light fast elegant Automotive design like Chapman’s Lotus was and IS famous for and simple, light, fast, elegant software design.
The even sadder thing is now that I think about, I have a hard time naming a single piece of software today that is light, fast and elegant, all that seems to come to mind are bloated, slow and heavy.
Is foobar2000 or Miranda IM or Opera close enough? :p
Foobar2000 is. Miranda is light, but is definitely not elegant nor simple especially when configuring it for the first time.
I’d say that depends, if you leave Miranda mostly on default values it’s fine. But you’re probably right :p
That said, this reminded me of another IM client which definitely fits “light, fast and elegant” – Google Talk, the original win32 client. Sadly it’s unmaintained for a long time, and now apparently even deprecated.
Quite a few viruses probably fit the categories.
Elegant: like that one that used a special character to turn []slx. into .xls, etc. That’s genius.
Fast: it spread all over our shared network drive within hours.
Light: I think it embedded itself directly into the files it infected, with no appreciable change in disk usage.
Nah, it can get even sadderer. For example, how after 5+ decades of computing, people are still using highly subjective out of context qualitative approaches to deal emotionally with a field which is highly quantitative in nature…
It’s sad to see Lotus go, but I’m not very fond of the living dead either.
Give away Lotus 123 for DOS for free and let some people have some fun with it.
They will need to learn how to read Assembly runes before.
The dos version is still heavily in use it seems, as the old guard diehards seems to still prefer it for some reasons. All i know is my now elderly mother does all her spreadsheets in lotus for dos and she is so blazingly fast with it that even with a fully graphical spreadsheet program like the ones found in ms office or openoffice i still, to this date has no chance at all at completing most of her tasks on that ancient (in computer terms) dos machine at near her speeds.
It is impressive to watch, almost like an near extinct animal in the wilds.
Sidenote* She does have a newer system but still boots up the old IBM with the series-m keyboard for spreadsheet work even though she has dosbox set up on her brand new laptop. She also claims that her noisy ribbon dot matrix printer produce more long lasting prints.
Despite its shortcomings I think DOS is pretty effective for work.
Its single tasking makes people focus more. No distractions.
And it’s fast. It boots quick, applications start fast. Even a 286 or 386 can handle WP 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBASE IV fine.
Imagine building a new DOS machine. It wouldn’t cost much. A single core CPU, some memory and some storage. Just think how many retro DOS applications a 2 GB SSD disk could hold and how fast it would be.
Well, MSDOS would definitly have some hardware compatibility issues. Freedos would be your best bet. I agree many companies might get a productivity boost from using it, from employees that have straight forward job responsibilities that don’t require or benefit from multitasking. I’ve know quite a few companies that take windows and apply a crap load of group policies to allow it to only run a legacy dos program. It kind of seemed like a waste to me…
The fastest machine I ever owned was an old Compaq luggable with 2.5 meg RAM under DOS 3.3.
All of my applications, including WordPerfect 4.2, Lotus, and VPGraphics were loaded into a RAM disk (not like DOS could access that extra 1.8 meg directly!).
At the command prompt, I could type “wp letter[return]Dear John,” without any pause, and WordPerfect wouldn’t miss a single letter – it launched faster than I could type!
Today, I double-click the Word 2010 icon and wait almost 30 seconds for that lumbering sloth to drag itself off the disk and get ready to do something useful. And to save and exit, it’s not “[F7]ny” – I click the File tab, which bizarrely takes over the entire screen with a complex control panel, find “Save As” which exits the control panel for the text editor again and then brings up a dialog box, and so on. Weirdness gets worse every release.
This is not progress.
Geesh, I sound just like my grandfather…
I’m guessing you could hit alt + F4 (quit program) and it will then ask you to save and you can so by just hitting enter. It’s how I quit ‘n’ save using Notepad.
But I think if users knew all the keyboard shortcuts they’d be much faster and efficient. It’s annoying to watch people travel the entire screen with their mouse pointer trying to hit some button or bring focus somewhere.
I guess the mouse and GUI made it easier for people with little to no computer skills to use computers, but they almost never go beyond that. They never learn anything else, no keyboard shortcuts or more advanced options of the application.
Possibly, although since I didn’t name the file as part of the launch, I still have to deal with dialogs to get out.
What’s more annoying to me is that “discoverability” of efficient shortcuts is quickly fading. Whereas the original GUI usability specs seemed to always insist on identifying “shortcuts” next to menu items (e.g., ^X for Edit>Cut), the new touch interfaces go to the opposite extreme. I had my corporate iPad over a year before someone showed me that dragging 4 fingers (not 3, not 5) from the bottom would show me loaded apps. How the @#$ was I supposed to figure THAT out!
So it’s a bit of a relief that my Fortune 50 company is moving to a more traditional SUSE Linux desktop where keyboard shortcuts aren’t just allowed but encouraged. My productivity has really soared since automation returned to the office.
But I’m a dinosaur. We’ll all be frantically waving our hands and shouting at our monitors in a few years, I’m certain. Guess I need the exercise anyway. 😉
It’s all in the manual, but the problem is nothing comes with a manual anymore.
I have the IBM DOS manual here and you could kill a person if you hit him on the head with it. Now DOS is simple ‘n’ easy (not including CONFIG.SYS voodoo of course). So how come it has a rather large book while an advanced operating system like OS X or Windows comes with nothing?
You can find many hints ‘n’ clever tricks regarding a whole range of hard- and software products. So developers are building them in, but they are announced nowhere.
ctrl+s stopped working under newer MS Office versions? (luckily(?), I really don’t know, don’t have a way to quickly check
)
I’ve never used any application where ^s executed a “save and exit”. However, I also see no way in Office 10 to discover a key combination that does – though (ironically) I could google it, I suppose.
yea… I am still using the 123R4 / under DOSBox on win8-x64! So many years I developed a budget/cash flow/bank accounts/portfolio management its full of macros anyway.
I don’t care what is my current platform, as it can run for evern under dos emulator 😉
The Smartsuite hasn’t been updated in a while. Still I think I like it better than MS office. BTW, the recent versions of it (9.8) did not contain Lotus Notes, which is sold separately.
Edited 2013-05-22 15:41 UTC
Because Notes is a shit mail client, that redeems itself only when connected to Domino with all the extra features…
By this time GMail and Outlook.com have a widely simpler and more functional interface than anything for mail authoring.(Don’t get me started on the POS that is Outlook 2010)
I was using the program since 1983, and began developing programs since 1990. Since it used BASIC commands and Assembly Language structure, it was a great environment to develop applications.
The office where I used to work, still use those programs.
Thanks to Lotus the PC broke the 640k barrier, first with expanded memory and later with extended memory.
It was the first program that made use of context sensitive help. (for those that didn’t discovered, while you were accessing a function, you press F1, and an specific help will appear)
In Lotus, I create very long conditional functions, that even Excel cannot handle/don’t allow to create. If I need those conditionals in Excel then I save the document as an Excel file and presto, the function is converted.
By the way, don’t forget Approach database. Is powerful enough to allow to connect various databases in a same presentation page. Excel cannot do that.
Lotus organizer is also another program I will miss.
I will miss those programs.