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.
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.
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.
They were, and Excel users are just as devoted if not more so. We had many people return their shiny new mac because Excel on MacOS is not exactly like Windows. And they were mad about it.
Lotus on a Sun? Why not.
How about 1-2-3 on SCO Unix. And Wordperfect. We had a salesrep (VAR) back in the day who made some scratch in the local legal market with the pitch "why give every secretary an expensive PC when you can buy one PC and a bunch of really cheap Wyse serial terminals". Our support folks came to really hate that guy (start at "you were using a typewriter 5 years ago...now you get to learn the Unix CLI" and it only got worse).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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/
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 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:)
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.
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!
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 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.
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 ---
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.
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.
I love old computing like this. Games are fun and all, but it's always nice to see the more professional side of things. I'm particularly fond of CP/M despite not exactly liking the CP/M style of operating systems and their ilk (MS/PCDOS and NT)
36 comments
[ 222 ms ] story [ 2154 ms ] threadIf 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.
It will beats outlook as a mail client in a lot of ways, such as having actual usable full text search.
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.
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.
They were, and Excel users are just as devoted if not more so. We had many people return their shiny new mac because Excel on MacOS is not exactly like Windows. And they were mad about it.
Lotus on a Sun? Why not.
How about 1-2-3 on SCO Unix. And Wordperfect. We had a salesrep (VAR) back in the day who made some scratch in the local legal market with the pitch "why give every secretary an expensive PC when you can buy one PC and a bunch of really cheap Wyse serial terminals". Our support folks came to really hate that guy (start at "you were using a typewriter 5 years ago...now you get to learn the Unix CLI" and it only got worse).
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!
Information density, no decorative UI elements distracting you from the content, and keyboard navigability.
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
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?
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.
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 :-)
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.
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?
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html
Might be interesting to others interested in 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'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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
and as stated there
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.
Finally a leet code application I recognize