The killer spreadsheet

This is not a real 8-bit story, but fits well into my the "work efficiently with outdated tools" line of habits. And it is not unrelated to the Plus/4 after all. This whole thing started by the purchase of a "Lotus SmartSuite" CD from 1997 the other day. This one in particular:

I ran into this one at an auction site, it was sold in the city where I reside, it costed far less than a pint of beer, yet I do not really know how I got tempted to get hold of it. Well, it does have of course a taste of nostalgia to it, and I remember myself giving a Lotus Organizer a try back in the good old days when I was using a Psion Series 3a as a daily driver, concluding that it would be a great piece of software if I'd eventually use an OS it is compatible with.

But come on, when it comes to more-than-8 bit-computers I'm an old-fashioned Unix power user, I switched from Solaris to Linux around 1996. I have no real nostalgic memories of DOS or Windows whatsoever. In addition, I was never too much fond of office software. Why to use Office text document editors or presentation makers: we do have LaTeX, we do have org mode. Maybe to write a quick letter, and, after all, LibreOffice does a good job with a document exported from Emacs org with the purpose of printing a document or sharing it with someone stuck into the office era.

Same with spreadsheets. I prefer AWK or Pandas over them, albeit I admit they are indeed clever things and practical for many tasks. In fact, if they are used properly, they can really be game changers. As a side note, I remember an opinion in a Hungarian book about Commodore Plus/4 applications and games. The author says about the built-in spreadsheet that he cannot understand why this kind of software, which he keeps on calling "accountancy sheet" is allegedly so popular in the world, if once it is mainly for accountants. It is really amazing how much the world has changed in a few decades. Or he just didn't get the rock'n roll… Well I did back in the day, using the built-in application on the Plus/4, but then Unix and AWK came. Spreadsheets grew into the usual WYSWG tools to tamper with the mouse all the time… At least this is what I thought till recently. Yesterday, however, I got on my BMX to get the Lotus CD, and it has changed my perspective.

It is not the CD itself, nor its contents directly, but it is the curiosity and searches it triggered, which lead to some revelations. Let's see what I've found.

1 An open-source Windows NT clone OS

My CD is for Window 95 and NT. Somehow I didn't go for Wine, I thought maybe I'd rather put something into a virtual machine to try my programs first. But how to get some Windows which is not illegal, does not want license keys, does not want to be registered? And I ran into ReactOS, available from here: https://reactos.org. This is a free and open source Windows NT clone. Installed it on a VM, and, even if it is alpha, it works like a charm. I've installed the stuff from my CD. It was fun altogether, but there was a particular part that changed my views completely: Lotus 1-2-3.

2 Lotus 1-2-3: the killer spreadsheet, natively in my Linux terminal

What I've learned and was not clear to me before, that when the author of my old Plus/4 book said spreadsheets were very successful, it had nothing to do with those pieces of software people associate to it nowadays. No, the killer application from the 1980-s to the next few decades, it was Lotus 1-2-3. Mine from the CD runs neatly on ReactOS, and it is also usable with Wine… But then I ran into this one: https://github.com/taviso/123elf. They say, "This is a native port of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 to Linux." And it is, indeed. More details of this charming project are here. Downloaded it, and also, it really needs an old native UNIX binary release of Lotus 1-2-3… yes, it will really run that code, natively on my 2025 Linux machine! So did some tampering with apt, make, etc. And here we go:

Finally, a really professional spreadsheet application in my terminal. It opens its menu with '/', as if I was searching in vi. It can be controlled with keystrokes, and entering keywords. No tampering with the mouse. Now I understand why this made spreadsheets unavoidable as a software category. And if I run the Windows version from the CD, the same keystrokes do work - though not with Wine unfortunately. (It should open a separate special window with "classic" controls when these are used, and my Wine crashes at that point.) So for sure I will also use them more frequently in the future, in my everyday tasks. Like back in the day, with the Plus/4's built-in spreadsheet.