I’ll cut to the chase; through a combination of unlikely discoveries, crazy hacks and the 90s BBS warez scene I’ve been able to port Lotus 1-2-3 natively to Linux – an operating system that literally didn’t exist when 1-2-3 was released!
If you want to hear how a proprietary application could be ported to new operating systems 30 years after release, read on!
This isn’t running through an emulator or a VM – this is a real port. Amazing work.
There’s probably even a few users still using lotus 123 out there..
Yes still using it ocasionnaly. But it’s 123 from smartsuite millenium (what a great office suite !), not this text-mode oldie 🙂 Anyway, congrats to Tavis Ormandy for this port 🙂
I always preferred Quatro Pro over Lotus 1-2-3, but the wordprocessor from the Lotus Smartsuite for Windows 3.x was amazing! (Lotus WordPro?) Unfortunately, they really screwed up the first Windows 9x releases, and I moved over to WordPerfect Office 7 (horrible) and 9 (still the best version, IMO) and never looked at Lotus products again.
Company I worked for only migrated off lotus a few years ago. Although it’s search was Aweful, it was a remarkably robust system for emails that served the company’s needs. The migration was driven more by prejudice than it was by features. As it turns out email hasn’t changed much over the decades…
I assume you are referring to Lotus Notes, not Lotus 1-2-3.
Offtopic, but what the heck.
Never used lotus notes, however email is more and more difficult to admin. Looks like Lotus Notes is now owned by HCL now. But things like supporting spf and dkim as well as the newer TLS versions are critical. An email solution form 10 years ago wouldn’t actually work that well.
I first used Lotus 1-2-3 in 1983, the first year that 1-2-3 came out at a logging company that I worked for. It definitely wasn’t perfect but it was a god send compared to VisiCalc which I used before 1-2-3. There are MANY things that I still love about it more than Excel. You didn’t need to be a programmer in order to automate things to a complex level. All you needed to be able to do is string a bunch of easy to use commands together and it was amazing what you could do.
I played D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) and I automated my character sheets to where I could create a full fledged character literally as fast as I could think. And I was able to automate combat so that cheaters couldn’t cheat on rolling the dice.
I also used it to create an easy way to schedule call centers for a nationwide bank which was more powerful than anything we tested over six months of looking into what scheduler to buy. The person that actually ended up being in charge of scheduling for the whole country used my spreadsheet and then used the result to upload into the program that the bank spent a LOT of money on. His managers couldn’t figure out how he was updating schedules so fast thinking he had figured out a way to automate their chosen program. When they found out HOW he/(we) automated things they were stunned. I saved that guy maybe ten to fifteen hours a week scheduling nine call centers.
Work smarter, not harder. That’s always been my motto. Also, make sure to focus on the user experience including putting in the time to for getting rid of bugs. And if you have bugs, don’t give a$$hole generic error messages. If you don’t have a clue why someone is getting errors, have senior programmers get involved. If you are a senior programmer and you can’t figure out at least generally why that error is happening but just haven’t had time to fix it (1 MAKE time), if you don’t have a clue, you shouldn’t be a senior programmer.
Gosh darn it, now I’m really really in the mood to go back to Lotus. Never cared for Microsoft office, with the exception for MS access, just because of all the chaotic apps I’ve dealt with built upon it. The only good thing about MS office, for me was its stability back in the early 90’s. Well that and the programmability, the libraries for dealing with excel through Jet database drivers was pretty nice.