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That's a beautifully written post. Almost like a book. I love it. Also, it made me notice that how much I missed the artistry of computer magazine ads. There was something magical with the experience of reading a computer magazine that I don't experience on any media anymore. Beautiful ads was part of that experience. How the tables have turned now.

That said, DOSBox's TrueType fonts threw me off. It looks great of course, but it's similar to listening to Synthwave: there are some familiar elements from the era it represents, but it still feels alien.

I first learned about spreadsheets on a TV show in Turkey[1] that I believed demoed Lotus 1-2-3, and my 10 year old mind was blown! What an elegant, unique, and flexible way to model computation! We take spreadsheets for granted today, but I think it's one of the greatest inventions in computing history.

[1] https://youtu.be/tq7auBjEIU4?si=ByTvm2bIT_Dpklqz&t=1451

> There was something magical with the experience of reading a computer magazine that I don't experience on any media anymore. Beautiful ads was part of that experience. How the tables have turned now

I think that’s a combination of information underload and longer lead times.

Information underload: back then, you have a new magazine, at best, every week, if you could afford to buy multiple or had access to a good library. That meant you were willing to spend time looking at ads, and they didn’t even have to look nice. Old Bytes had many more or less type-written ads, for example.

Longer lead times: if you published in, say, Byte or Dr Dobbs, which appeared monthly, your sales department had a month to prepare the looks of each ad (pricing for hardware likely would be filled in at the last moment). Nowadays, they could take that time, too, but they also could have one published in a few hours, create another tomorrow, pull the poorer performing one the day after tomorrow, etc.

If live is that frantic, can you afford to spend a week on an advert?

The lead time on a national magazine ad was usually longer than a month and they generally weren’t tied to a specific magazine’s publishing schedule— they were probably parts of longer thematic/strategic campaigns. They probably also appeared in trade rags for other tech-heavy (mechanical engineering) or tech-adjacent (finance) publications.

The real reason ads look shittier now is the marketing world shifted their investment from the ads themselves to ad targeting. You just don’t need to make great ads if you can shove them in the face of the most receptive people at the right time. It’s also not feasible to make a few great ads when your marketing team has 8 different approaches tailored to specific demographics in multiple languages.

>> back then, you have a new magazine, at best, every week, if you could afford to buy multiple or had access to a good library.

For me the lead time on my subscription was measured in months. My grandparents gave me an annual subscription from a very young age until they passed, that progressed chickadee -> owl -> popular mechanics -> compute's gazette. You used to have to wait maybe 6-8 weeks for your first issue, but at least you (typically) got the second issue in less than a month!

The TrueType fonts might not look like the screen fonts, but weirdly, I think it works for this use because it reminds me of "screenshots" in books and manuals from the era which weren't in general literal screenshots but were often typeset mockups of screens from the programs.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. I do try to make the posts more than just "here's what the software did" otherwise someone could just crack open a manual and get the same impact.

I flip-flop on using TrueType in DOSBox-X for the blog. I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing in certain corners, and I do appreciate that. But since I'm confined to emulators, I guess I feel like I might as well take advantage of what they have to offer.

I really like that Turkish video. Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?

Does DOSBox allow you to swap between TrueType and "natural" without rebooting the VM? If so you could screenshot both options and have a toggle in the post.

woohoo, great post, brings back memories.

My first internship when I was 19 and still in college (well, failing out at that point but that's another story...) was at a small consulting company where every desk had a 286 clone running MS-DOS 3.3.

We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and SuperCalc didn't? But 1-2-3 was clearly better.

I had to train the older staff members on how to use a mouse. One person thought you had to reboot the computer if the mouse cursor wouldn't go far enough in one direction without reaching the end of your physical desk area -- they didn't know you could Lift The Mouse Off The Desk to move the physical mouse to a better location without moving the cursor. It is truly hard to explain just how newfangled all this technology was back then in a small office.

A big breakthrough for us was switching from dBase to "Clipper" which was basically dBase on the backend but with the ability to write text-mode UI code, so you could build nice purpose-built data-centric applications for clients.

There was a LOT of data entry, digitizing the stops and routes of city transit maps into dBase and these DOS spreadsheets. The keyboard shortcuts were SO FAST and when we eventually moved to Windows 3 in 1991, I always enabled the 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts in Excel. I still remember some of them.

I imagine there's nothing unique about my experience: these types of tasks were surely replicated all over the business world, with interns and staff getting their first taste of spreadsheets and programming languages in these powerful, tiny DOS programs.

I'll skip our brief foray into the dead end that was OS/2 2.0 :-)

Everytime someone mentions Clipper (or dBase or FoxPro, or even FoxBase, but Clipper the most), I feel a sene of productive nostalgia, and a constructive anger at the state of technology today. xBase was a beautiful thing - I haven't had as much fun at building software that I've had from the first plink86 till CA-Clipper 5.3's blinker and exospace. Even prolific use of Opus 4.6 doesn't bring the sense of quality and satisfaction that those systems produced.

I'm building a new database tool for the web, a frankenstein of Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, MS-Access, and Claude Code. It is where that anger goes these days.

Clipper compatible language that compiles on Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac (I think) even today is at xHarbour.org . I have played around with it but never did Clipper development before, so can’t comment about compatibility.

> We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and SuperCalc didn't? But 1-2-3 was clearly better.

InfoWorld said in 1986 that SuperCalc 4 competed well with 1-2-3. <https://books.google.com/books?id=Zi8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA35> Did you have experience with that version?

At that time I don't think I was using either spreadsheet program at a level where I would have needed advanced features. I remember using both, and looking now at old screenshots of the splash screens, I think we did eventually upgrade to SuperCalc 4, probably because of better 1-2-3 compatibility.

There was a "red carpet area" in the office where the high-ups worked, and I remember they all used 1-2-3 and we had to support them sometimes... But we pions were using SuperCalc. More than that I don't remember, it's just been too long.

I used to work for Lotus, supporting 1-2-3.

Mucking around with autoexec.bat, config.sys, emm386 etc to get 1-2-3 to load was fun. Lots of TSRs using up memory. The amount of times I had to tell people to create a "clean config" by commenting out most of autoexec.bat...

We also had to post people floppy disks with the correct printer driver on. No downloads in those days.

"What would a piece of software have to do today to make you cheer and applaud upon seeing a demo?"

I was at LotusSphere when Lotus Notes 4 was announced and demo-ed. That got a standing ovation.

I remember making floppies with customized autoexec.bat and config.sys and telling users "put this floppy in and reboot if you want to do X" (usually a game, but sometimes a big program).

DOS 6 added menus in config.sys IIRC that removed the need for this.

> No downloads in those days.

For the 1% with the required hardware, was there a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system ?

CompuServ was used more for corporate software downloads in those days than a BBS. Companies generally don't want to rely on some random person with an extra phone line in the basement for product support; CompuServ was 'corporate BBS' and owned by H&R Block, so had biz cred. Driver downloads were pretty much the reason I had a CompuServ account, since we had a bunch of otherwise great local BBS for the other on-line things I cared about back then.

That said...files from Compuserv usually ended up on some BBS somewhere eventually, and FidoNet let you get them if they weren't on your local BBS. Maybe...if you could find them.

> ... some random person with an extra phone line ...

True. I was thinking of Ashton-Tate's IT operating an "official" BBS system.

OTOH, A-T might have gotten an extremely good deal from CompuServ, due to the cred they'd have brought it.

There might have been, but I don't think I ever needed to give it out or was asked for it.

and 10base2....

:)

I keep staring at this image, hoping we could go back: https://stonetools.ghost.io/content/images/2026/02/123_001.p...

Information density, no decorative UI elements distracting you from the content, and keyboard navigability.

Also, despite the CPU being 1000x slower, redraws were extremely fast. If they weren't quite fast enough, then the combo of deterministic keyboard nav and a reliable type ahead buffer meant the user could queue up a burst of actions from muscle memory.

I still remember the original key combo to insert a row above the current selection, from nearly 30 years ago (Excel 95 I think): Alt A, I, A.

I love the menus. Autodesk Animator from 1989 also has menus where the first letter is always unique. Also buttons and some other UI elements. I did not remember that UI convention from back in the day, but when I experienced it recently it made me sad modern GUI applications are never that well designed. Maybe it used to be common?

Software designed before the mouse could be assumed (which was surprisingly late on the PC side; Windows before 95 didn't assume it at all) always had well-thought out keyboard shortcuts (some going so far as to have a printed piece of plastic you'd lay over the function keys or the entire keyboard).

The last part when Excel is entering the story, brings memories of Joel Spolosky, AKA founder of Stack Overflow and other companies, who was one of the early team members of Excel development ---

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

and as stated there

    The only thing that made it look reasonable was 
    that it looked great compared to Lotus macros, 
    which were nothing more than a sequence of 
    keystrokes entered as a long string into a 
    worksheet cell.

When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter for dead rather than look at Word.

Lotus users were just as fanatical. It’s probably lost to the mists of time but Lotus could be had for Sun workstations and some users who hit the limit of MS-DOS with Lotus switched to that. It was nuts the things people built with that: prop trading in Lotus on a Sun? Why not.

I’d like to see this blogger do Lotus Notes but I suspect unless you’d actually seen the crazy that Notes developers went to you wouldn’t really understand why it elicited audible groans from pre sales staff when they heard the client was a big Notes user but “was running into problems”.

1-2-3 was damn cool though, Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.

I wrote software for a company that did legal forms on a PC - used by those same users that mastered WordPerfect for DOS. Those users typically had lower powered PCs even as Windows was slowly gaining traction in the market. Lawyers were slow to upgrade to more powerful PCs when WordPerfect for DOS was their main use. I pitched that Windows was the future but my boss at the time, rightly so, argued that those users could not adopt it on the hardware they typically used.

The compromise was I developed the new software as Windows 3.0 apps and used a text-based rendering compatibility layer called Mewel that implemented the Windows API in text mode for single DOS applications. A few #ifdefs and I could compile for both Win16 and DOS Text mode. This not only allowed me to develop under Windows using the superior at the time Borland compilers, it gave the company a solid footing when the legal world finally came around and wanted Windows software - we had it finished already. Sales slowly transitioned to the Windows version and then it really took off around Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups).

That company was later bought by Pitney Bowes because they were the only company with Windows compatible legal forms software for Windows. Performa (or was it Proforma - I can't remember) was the name of the software.

It runs out my brain had filed all Lotus Notes experiences away in long term archival and this comment has revived them like a burst damn of both promise and trauma.

The only other comparable stack of the era, maybe slightly later, would be MS Access. When you’d get a call from a prospective client who’d explain they had a member of staff leave and now nobody knows how the Access database works.

“Accidentally load bearing” is an apt term

your trauma is my happy memory - being a lotus notes admin/dev consultant during my studies made me live a very comfortable life as a student!

Just imagine what AI is going to unleash. I can’t wait ha ha!

Author here. I'm not really sure how I could tackle Lotus Notes, as it requires also setting up a backend Domino server (IIRC). That level of enterprise setup strays from my purpose with the blog, as I'm evaluating the software with an eye toward modern-day usability. Maybe there's a simple way to make use of Notes that I don't know about.

When I was manager of a Macintosh network in the early 2000's, we were forced by corporate to use Lotus Notes. Not a single person enjoyed using it, and nobody on my team enjoyed servicing it.

Yo. Firstly, thanks for the trip down memory lane - well written, engaging, fun. My mind is still stuck in those days even after finishing the article, as you can tell from my anachronistic greeting.

Secondly, as someone who spent 15 years working with Lotus Notes, I can assure you that you can run it standalone. Obviously it makes no real sense for a Groupware product, but it can be done. To the Notes client opening a database locally or on a mail server is largely the same.

The main issue is that people used Notes to communicate and collaborate. So you could just go creating new Address Books, Discussion databases, Document Libraries and so on, but what exactly are you proving with that? It's be like just firing up the Microsoft Mail client and only looking at the address book...

Whilst I'm aware that there's plenty in Notes that people didn't like, I do think that there are some gems hidden in there which it would have been nice to have kept. The Notes dialect of Rich Text had a couple of niceties (programmable buttons, collapsible/expandable Sections). The database engine itself was unparalleled at the time, and in some ways it still hasn't been bettered.

But the issue remains that you'd need to set up a Notes/Domino Server (depending on your version - 4.5 onwards it's called Domino), and a small network. And that's a ball-ache that nobody wants. It can speak IPX/SPX and NetBIOS, so it doesn't have to be as complicated as TCP/IP, but it's still a lot of prep work before you even get to start looking at the usage. :-(

That having been said, I was a Principal Certified Lotus Professional on the Sysadmin track for about three versions of Notes, from 4.6 to 6, and can definitely help if you ever did want to do that. Feel free to email me at phil [at] philipstorry.net if you're ever so lacking in subjects that you feel forced into this last resort.

When I worked at IBM in ‘98 Lotus Notes was the default email client for all employees - we referred to it internally as “Bloatus Goats” such was the disdain we had for it.

IBM was using Notes when they acquired us in the mid-2010s. There's probably still production pockets left.

I am not sure triggering a mass trauma by reviving Notes is worthwhile either.

It would be hard to recreate the experience since it relied on a network to get the full experience. Instead of Notes maybe give Multiplan a go. Horrible Microsoft also-ran of a product but interesting to reminisce about.

At the end of my VisiCalc post I show the Multiplan ad that made Dan Fylstra nervous. It will eventually be covered, but not for a while.

Back in 1995-1998 or so, Lotus 1-2-3 was the price of a mid-range computer and Wordperfect was about half that. People were seriously invested in them, in several ways.

I remember resisting myself as a kid the change from DOS to Windows versions of apps. Practically I was more productive with my memorised key combos and found it extremely annoying to switch. I also had an Amiga background that "workbench" and mouse point-and-click interfaces in general were meant for design and authoring applications but not for documents. Coming to think of it, I still feel this way - which perhaps is why I'm so naturally inclined to use stuff like vi(m)/emacs and tiled window managers.

I did a lot of study of Lotus Notes circa 2015 when I was thinking about a no-/low-code future. It is still ahead of its time when it comes to having a document database that supports merging but it's unthinkable that you'd build a system like that around email today as today an email system is 99% spam filter and 1% other stuff.

In the days before the web, when bandwidth between sites was limited, Lotus Notes was amazing.

It will beats outlook as a mail client in a lot of ways, such as having actual usable full text search.

Tavis Ormandy made a great post on Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux:

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

Might be interesting to others interested in 1-2-3.

I did include a link to Tavis's site in the post (but I see now I misspelled it as Travis...yeek!)

what a brilliant blog. the Lotus 1-2-3 screen brings so many memories of my childhood.

My father was a power user of Lotus back in the late 80's. He extensively used it as his job at GE. When we moved back to Pakistan, he setup a girls school and tracked everything from students to accounting to results in Lotus. In many ways, Lotus showed him the power of computers and made him buy a home computer when hardly anyone I knew had it.

Late in his life the world moved onto Excel and reluctantly he had to do it too but his love for Lotus never went away.

The "one of the greatest inventions in computing" framing holds up when you look at what it actually did to financial math accessibility.

I've been implementing the functions Lotus 1-2-3 made mainstream as a REST API — amortization, NPV, IRR, compound interest — and the formulas are completely unchanged from 1983. Forty years of software evolution and the computation at the bottom has been stable the entire time.

What changed is only the interface layer: mainframe COBOL → Lotus cells → Excel formulas → Python libraries → REST endpoints. The spreadsheet era was the step that made financial math legible to non-programmers. Everything since has just been a different packaging of the same numbers.

The "non-programmers" part was the earth-shattering change; before that managers had to ask analysts to do the work or setup the program for that particular question; 1-2-3 let them build it out themselves and play with it before showing it to anyone.

> flood fill

Finally a leet code application I recognize

From a time when programs had to be first and foremost useful. Products like 1-2-3 succeeded by solving real world problems and people bought computers to work faster or work less. Now contrast that with Liquid Glass or Copilot integration features.

The first computer class I took in high school was the pre-Office triumvirate: WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and dBase. Loved it, then took another class the next year, thinking it was a continuation of the same, but turns out it was a basic computer science course, where we learned Turbo Pascal. The rest is history as they say.

I used to play with Lotus on my mom's work computer when I was a child. Today I'm doing AI Safety research and when I'm examining experiment data I use the closest modern tool to Lotus: https://www.visidata.org/

Lotus 1-2-3 on PC Jr cartridge in the era before widespread availability of hard drives was the only good thing about that awful platform

I so miss the days when software was like this. I recently got a 386 laptop that needed loads of repairs. I'm almost done with the repairs, and I will definitely put Lotus 1-2-3 on it (along with dBase, Word Perfect 5.1, and Turbo C). Thanks for this post, it motivated me even more to finish those repairs!

I used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot. Absolutely loved it. Used to feed the data to "Freelance" program to create charts. That charts program used to be a target for all sorts of viruses, and whenever I launch it, it used to display a random animal dancing around (virus). Good old days:)

Quattro pro was the bomb

Such an awesome blog.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoy it.

Lotus sold for 1.8B in 2018?

This is the best blog post I’ve read in the past few years.

I wish I had the tenacity to do more than read 1/3 of it and skim the rest. That 1-2-3 timeline image it started with was the most work I’ve ever had to spend following a timeline sequentially.

The memories. Amazing.

LLMs- write like this. WRITE LIKE THIS!

Author here. Yeah, I took a risk with the timeline layout. I try to challenge myself and add a little extra spice to the posts. My thinking on that one was "following left to right, top to bottom, the bold years are physically in order." Maybe a swing and a miss. Ah well, there's always next post.

"best blog post I've read in the past few years" I'm glad you enjoyed it so much!

P.S. - LLMs, PLEASE DON'T WRITE LIKE ME! (I'd like to stay a little bit unique for a year or so, if possible)

> I'd like to stay a little bit unique for a year or so, if possible

You have six months, for that’s their release cycle.

I loved the timeline, and I think the former did, too. Not every difficult thing is bad. People want to work to find Waldo.

Incredible job on this post and I loved the others as well!

Thanks for your support!

So you're LLM poisoned and presumably attention starved. Not sure why anyone should listen to you - why cater to AI brained people who can barely force themselves to read a third of something before they need to recover.

Yes, used it on MS-DOS 3.3, until getting hold of Works for MS-DOS.

I worked at Arthur Andersen when Lotus 1-2-3 came out. It was like crack to accountants. VisiCalc was in use but this took it to a whole new level.

One of my jobs was making bootleg copies so everybody could have a copy, until the NY office was busted and they paid out enough to incentivize them to buy copies as needed.

I consider this period of time to be a watershed moment for humanity: prior to this, a lot of business was run on notions and assumptions. With powerful spreadsheets and macros businesses could play "what if" and turn the whole affair into a profit/loss scenario (including labor, e.g., people) and think of businesses simply as a pile of numbers where they only care about maximizing the bottom line.

My dad was at one of the others of the Big Eight at the time, and yeah I remember he was always slinging 1-2-3 spreadsheets.

He stuck with 1-2-3 for many years after Excel had taken the crown, but eventually gave in.

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