9 ms·
Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution
- homarp 6y agovery interesting software archeology!
- dwiel 6y agoA 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. Google calculator is the closest thing I've seen to this, but it isnt in spreadsheet form. Anyone know of a system that provides this functionality?
- mikepurvis 6y agoInterestingly, it seems there's a Sheets add-on which provides at least some of what you want— unfortunately not with cell metadata, but rather using pairs of adjacent cells for the quantity and units: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/legendsheet/210236000731 https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/legendsheet/210... The dev does a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Nvw2q889Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Nvw2q889Q
- kroltan 6y agoNot a spreadsheet, no, (it is more of a freeform worksheet) but SMath Studio is a breeze to work on with units. It has complete support for units of measurement and comes with most built-in. It can also decompose derived units into simpler forms if it finds a match. It is free but not open-source.
- codesnik 6y agospreadsheets barely have distinction between strings and numbers. Units would be another level! I hope that at some point something like a strongly typed jupyter notebook tailored specifically for table inputs would arise and replace some current usages of spreadsheets in office/consumer space.
- andylynch 6y agoHaven’t tried it yet since not on Office 365 but there’s a very interesting custom data types feature emerged in Excel just a few months ago https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/december-2020-excel-add-your-own-linked-data-type/ https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/december-2020-excel-add-yo...
- sir_nop 6y agoOr a programming language? Or a Python module?
- paulclinger 6y agoSomebody already referenced F# elsewhere in the thread: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-reference/units-of-measure https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe.... It will apply unit of measure checks as part of their static type checking.
- JNRowe 6y agoBeyond simply joining in on the F# love... If you're using Python anyway, then Pint¹ makes unit handling really easy. ¹ https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorial.html https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorial.html
- pletnes 6y agoIn python there’s the pint module, which works with pandas dataframes, which can read/write excel sheets. So yeah, maybe. Why do anything in excel, except for data entry?
- akx 6y agoThere's always Frink. https://frinklang.org/ https://frinklang.org/
- bpicolo 6y agoOr f# https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-reference/units-of-measure https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe...
- jsmith99 6y agoR also has a units package. It's mostly used by geospatial libraries.
- sidpatil 6y agoSo does Julia [1]. [1] https://github.com/PainterQubits/Unitful.jl https://github.com/PainterQubits/Unitful.jl
- leblancfg 6y agoNever tried it, but Wolfram has a Mathematica plug-in for Excel. https://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/ https://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/
- scrumper 6y agoI remember Mathematica being a bit weak with units actually. Natively there's no support, you have to rely on add-on packages and I didn't have much success with the popular one. But my experience is from version 8 (a while ago) so it may have improved since.
- friend-monoid 6y agoMathematica 9 and above has had significant improvements in its unit support. I’ve found it to be really good.
- captainmuon 6y agoYes this would have been so useful in my lab courses at university. Bonus points if cells could have errors and it could do error propagation. I started working on this back then but got frustrated trying to make a grid control and gave up :-)
- pjettter 6y agoInteresting! I do this on paper a lot because that's how I learned in college. Thinking of it. It's composing converters. That should be fairly easy to automate!
- vq 6y agoThe only one I know of is org-mode[0]. It defers calculations to calc-mode which handles units. [0]: https://orgmode.org https://orgmode.org
- tyingq 6y agoThere's this: http://www.dimensionengine.com/excel/DEAddIn/ http://www.dimensionengine.com/excel/DEAddIn/ Their description sounds a lot like yours.
- mhh__ 6y agoThis is one of the first uses C++ templates had way back in the early 90s IIRC.
- schoen 6y agoGNU units does this, but is definitely not a spreadsheet or anything like a spreadsheet. It might be possible for a spreadsheet to arrange to call it as a back-end, though. You have: 100 N / (50 m/s^2) You want: Definition: 2 kg
- LanceH 6y ago1-2-3 would allow you to plot a function on your graphs. Something that I haven't seen since. The solution now is to build a range and values, but that just adds one extra column of data to massage versus having a reference line covering the domain and range of that particular graph.
- moonbug 6y agoyou can do that in mathematica, I think.
- mceoin 6y agoIs this for business or personal use? (We're building a spreadsheet product @ Sourcetable.)
- actuallyalys 6y agoNot a spreadsheet, but Soulver and NoteCalc allow you to label and reference previous calculations in the same way a spreadsheet does.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThis is freaking awesome! I mostly stick to GUI era software, and find Word 97 to be amazing for writing. I run it inside a VM rather than using Wine.
- unixhero 6y agoWord97 has actually run perfectly in Wine since 1998-1999. I tested it back then and it worked perfectly.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThat's good to know. It just feels more "at home" inside a VM I already use for accessibility and compatibility testing anyway (IE3+ for my sites), and it starts up faster than with Wine for me.
- jasonjayr 6y agoThis is waaaay off topic, but you've piqued my interest -- what on earth are you still testing with IE3 for?
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI believe in any browser, and it,s a capable, usable, beautiful browser.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoDo you test on IE for Mac too, not every browser['s rendering] is beautiful to me! Tbh though, back in the day, I used to love jumping through all the hoops to get the idiot cousins in the browsing world rendering a webpage well.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI don't have an extensive Mac IE testing stable yet, but I have tested in IE5 Mac, which has its own rendering engine called Tasman. However, with every browser I add support for it becomes more and more likely that another one I try will also work, especially if it came later. Netscape 2.0 works, so that covers a good range. Pre-Mosaic, I have not done much testing yet, in part because it's difficult to find them.
- lykr0n 6y agoStuff like this is so cool, and also highlights the importance of archiving the internet. 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.
- technofiend 6y agoLotus 123's slash commands were extremely handy. To the point where Microsoft was forced to copy them when Excel first came out to ease transition of users. There's a ton of older references on the web on how to use them. See https://www.isric.org/sites/default/files/isric_report_1990_12.pdf https://www.isric.org/sites/default/files/isric_report_1990_... for a reproduction of 123's main menus. The sequences become muscle memory really fast.
- brassattax 6y agoHuh. First time I've ever seen "@" referred to as the "monkeytail sign" (pg 15)
- aendruk 6y agoGlobally it has a variety of often charming interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Names_in_other_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Names_in_other_languag...
- codetrotter 6y ago> snabel-a, the Swedish/Danish name (which means 'trunk A', as in 'elephant's trunk') This one is my favorite but I am biased because I grew up to this name. Always found it a funny name though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- roelschroeven 6y ago
- rmrfrmrf 6y agoI'm obsessed with that Siemens HighPrint 7400 manual cover.
- spoonjim 6y agoI want her to tie me up and do bad things to me while berating me in a German accent
- unixhero 6y agoTo be fair... HELL YEAH
- azinman2 6y agoWhen I was a kid, looking at all the photos in the Macintosh manual of the very 80s office setups made for some serious techno-lust material. It’s funny to look back at it all now, but it was often a combination of hardware that’d cost something pike $20k or more in 2021 dollars!
- jasonpeacock 6y agoThis is beautiful, I love it. So much passion, grit, and skill!
- cseleborg 6y agoYou had me at 'a boxed copy of the last DOS version released, version 4!'
- mixmastamyk 6y agoFascinating, I was a kid but just old enough to remember trying out this kind of DOS software and reading Norton's book as well. 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: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/115548 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/115548
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoHowever, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a "modern" terminal floss office suite. Lotus is not is not open source. You would need to get IBM to release it as open source, which of course means they would have to have the code stored somewhere. While we're at it we can get microsoft to release the dos versions of works and visual basic, and whoever owns wordperfect to release that.
- throwawayboise 6y agoWordperfect at least existed for Unix platforms so might be somewhat portable to linux. I don't remember Lotus or Microsoft ever being on Unix back in the day. Though Lotus did have Improv on the NeXT so maybe they did...
- girvo 6y agoWordGrinder is probably the only thing I can think of that’s open source and in the same spirit.
- anthk 6y agoAnd Wordtsar, but it needs X.
- eek04_ 6y agoFrom the article: > Lotus 1-2-3 was ported to a bunch of systems, including OpenVMS, Xenix, and even System/390. In 1991, Lotus released a version for SunOS4 on SPARC. Word (according to Wikipedia): > ... were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS (1985), AT&T UNIX PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989), SCO Unix (1994), and macOS (2001). Excel was originally a Mac program, but hasn't been available on any Unix platform since (as far as I can tell.)
- anthk 6y agoOn 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. Far lighter than LaTeX, and almost as user-friendly as the old word processors.
- schnable 6y agoAmazing story. Can't believe the Lotus FTP site is still live. Wonder where that thing is running and if anyone actually knows it still is. > I was able to find the drivers on an old ftp site. Wonder what FTP site this is and how he found it?
- EvanAnderson 6y agoIt's linked in the post: ftp://ftp.support.lotus.com/pub/ The Internet Archive has a copy too: https://archive.org/details/2008-12-23_ftp.support.lotus.com https://archive.org/details/2008-12-23_ftp.support.lotus.com
- schnable 6y agoHe mentioned another one as well.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoHeh heh. Poor reading skills on my part. The Cirrus Logic VGA drivers might have come from here: http://ftp.mpoli.fi/pub/pub/unpacked/hardware/display/cirrus/k543x-d1.zip/lotus30/ http://ftp.mpoli.fi/pub/pub/unpacked/hardware/display/cirrus... The HighPrint driver I'm less sure about.
- bostik 6y agoOh wow, Metropoli is still alive? I haven't seen that domain in ages. I was actually active on the BBS back in the day, years before WWW came on the scene and blew up the internet. Hell, I think my first widely known email address would have been @mpoli.fi one - and, this being in early 1990s, I actually walked over to the owner's house to pay the account creation fee in person. As far as the tech scene goes, you can probably trace most of the Finnish old guard to that system.
- Darkphibre 6y agoHeck, that reminded me of The Well! Looks like they're still going strong. :D https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/510/State-of-the-World-2021-page01.html https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/510/State-of...
- retiredalien 6y agoThis reminds of the
- antonzabirko 6y agoWow what an amazing read!
- ChuckMcM 6y agoIt 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. 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.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoHehe, this is Tavis (from Project Zero), so he might know a bit about security. Dopamine hits are probably a large determining factor of what kind of programmer you are. Making something from scratch has a longer glow, and a fulfilling crescendo, but nothing compares with the joy of finding the right thing to whisper to a machine to get it to do something it was never meant to. Whether it be displaying DOS interfaces in wide screen or dumping its memory. The pain of looking for the right combination only makes finding it sweeter.
- userbinator 6y agoThis 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.) I like stuff like this in the same ways as car modding --- teaching an old dog new tricks.
- rasz 6y ago>I've already written a generic VESA framebuffer you mean like this https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm ?
- userbinator 6y agoI was actually inspired by that one, but it has some glaring deficiencies (like windowed DOS boxes corrupting the graphics state) that I wanted to fix; but only managed to do so, partially, before other things took priority. The amount of code needed to get basic unaccelerated graphics working is surprisingly small; most of it has to do with detection and modeswitching. Once you set the mode, all you need to do is give Windows' GDI the appropriate framebuffer and related information (the structures are, not surprisingly, very similar to a BMP file header), and it will do all the rendering. Of course you can also hook into some of the drawing functions for some acceleration, but my testing with a relatively recent GPU and CPU showed that even unaccelerated 2D graphics is plenty fast for essentially everything but gaming. That's partly why I wanted to turn it into RDP --- which AFAIK is similar to GDI, but RPC'd over the network.
- skissane 6y agoAny chance you might open source the generic VESA framebuffer you wrote? It would be interesting to read the code.
- mmastrac 6y agoSomething like this could be useful for DOSBox acceleration to avoid having to go through the emulated SVGA layer. WinBox project?
- bombcar 6y agoReminds 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX 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).
- raldi 6y agoI had one of these in college! I hooked it up to a serial port and set up Linux to use it as a login terminal, so I could do email in Pine while my girlfriend worked on homework with the actual keyboard/mouse/monitor. It didn’t just have Lotus; it had a dedicated Lotus key.
- selcuka 6y agoLotus 1-2-3 was the killer application. It was the reason for many people for buying a computer.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoA PC was not fully IBM compatible unless it could run Lotus 1-2-3.
- bitwize 6y agoBasically, if it could run the IBM PC versions of Lotus and Flight Simulator, it was deemed "100% IBM compatible".
- bowmessage 6y agoSeeing that makes me want to go dust off my OpenPandora!
- Klwohu 6y agoI still use one of these to store my passwords and run certain ancient astronomy software. Today, we don't have any decent small computers which run of AA's.
- jhallenworld 6y agoYou 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. 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. Here is an ad for it: 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 https://books.google.com/books?id=LVCsAZClkfUC&pg=PT453&lpg=... It ran SCO Professional, Real World Accounting and a custom database. There was no TCP/IP. This system replaced the previous Radio Shack model 16-based system. That one ran RM/COS and had several serial port terminals.
- BoDlulu 6y agoHercules. Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time.
- lproven 6y agoPC-MOS/386 is FOSS now, but nobody seems to be interested. https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501 https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501 TBH it was a 2nd string product in its prime, IME. DR's Concurrent DOS/386 was the premium offering. I supported it in the late 1980s. This was around the time that a LAN of cheap PC-XT clones was becoming price-competitive with a big high-power 80386DX machine with lots of RAM and a bunch of dumb terminals on a multiport serial card. The terminal vendors and multiuser OS vendors fought back with colour terminals and then graphical terminals. CDOS386 supported these. The basic PC design supported 4 RS-232 ports, so you could have an 8MB 386DX with one user on the system console and four users on dumb terminals, all of them able to run even quite demanding DOS apps including fancy stuff like graphical print-preview or a spreadsheet that could draw graphs. The snag was that CDOS386 was not a DOS; it was a descendant of Concurrent CP/M. It ran DOS apps but could not use DOS drivers – it needed its own. So adding hardware was not a trivial exercise. Kit had to be chosen from short hardware compatibility list (and was therefore expensive) and drivers supplied as object files relinked with the kernel. It was not as simple as modifying CONFIG.SYS and rebooting – PC/MS-DOS sysadmin skills did not transfer over. And it couldn't usefully run Windows. So as soon as Windows 3 came out in 1990 and the market started to move to Windows and Windows apps, that was largely it for Concurrent DOS, PC-MOS etc. When DR was bought out by Novell, several forks of the codebase were continued for a while by OEM licencees, and it gained support for FAT32, USB and so on. A branch of the CDOS codebase is still just about alive though. DR did a 286 version, but were screwed over by Intel. It used a feature of prototype 80286 chips to multitask DOS apps, but this was removed in the final shipping CPU hardware. (Intel did not know and put it back but it was too late.) DR just took the OS in a different direction and sold it as a multitasking real-time OS instead, downplaying DOS compatibility. It bundled a multitasking version of its GEM desktop, too, so it was a multitasking GUI RTOS, called DR-FlexOS. This found a niche in electronic point-of-sale systems: EPOS, i.e. smart cash registers built around x86 PCs. It was later acquired by IBM who rebranded it as IBM 4680 OS, later IBM 4690 OS. (What a knack for snappy names Big Blue has!) IBM discontinued it just a few years ago, but it is still sold by Toshiba.
- sneak 6y agoThis is awesome. 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.
- mmastrac 6y agoProbably. archive.org has a wasm build of DOSBox that works reasonably well.
- tombert 6y agoI 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. 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.
- sjwright 6y agoCoding for obsolete platforms is analogous to black-and-white film photography with lenses of fixed focal length. Restriction breeds creativity by denying you access to the full gamut of easy, low effort solutions.
- Tijdreiziger 6y agoThere are a good number of old devices that still have a devout following. For MS-DOS you might check out e.g. Planet X3 [1]. Or how about Super Boss Gaiden [2], a game for a prototype console of which (AFAIK) only one unit is in existence (but you can play the game on an emulator, which apparently exists for this obscure console). [1] http://www.the8bitguy.com/product/planet-x3-for-ms-dos-computers/ http://www.the8bitguy.com/product/planet-x3-for-ms-dos-compu... [2] https://playstation.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Boss_Gaiden https://playstation.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Boss_Gaiden
- tombert 6y agoI knew about Planet X3 but somehow Super Boss Gaiden completely missed my radar. I will be playing this shortly!
- joubert 6y ago> can run on pretty much any modern platform under the sun Which is why web apps shine. Near-universal reach.
- aasasd 6y agoPatience 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.
- zenexer 6y agoHe’s a fairly accomplished security researcher who seems to have quite a knack for this sort of reverse engineering.[0]. I’m always amazed by his patience every time he publishes his research. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavis_Ormandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavis_Ormandy
- aasasd 6y agoYeah, I'm vaguely familiar with taviso's credentials—but there's security research and then there's digging out symbols to write a display driver for DOS Lotus 1-2-3. I'm saying that as someone who spends inordinate amounts of time trying to get emulators to run old games on my Mac; whacking my config into just the right shape; and using Lua instead of Python because scripts finish faster than Python starts up.
- syoc 6y ago"Fairly accomplished" is quite the understatement. I don't know anyone doing better work than Travis and I've not seen anyone saying otherwise either.
- zenexer 6y agoIndeed, it is. I didn’t want to sound like a fanboy, but damn, his work is amazing. I don’t know how he has the patience and dedication for half the work he does. And that’s not even to mention the quality of his write-ups.
- jpcooper 6y agoPeople might also be interested in sc (spreadsheet calculator): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)