
Mitch Kapor Introduces Lotus 1-2-3 Spreadsheet (1983) [video] - ohjeez
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g46m0vBC9fk
======
neebz
My father in the 80s was working at GE where he extensively used Lotus 1-2-3.
He loved it so much that he bought a computer in 85 and used to use it at home
as well. I always hated the boring blue and black screen.

We moved back to Pakistan in early 90s and we setup a small girls school. He
used Lotus to keep track of all students, results, late fees, accounts etc. It
required a lot of data entry but he absolutely loved that he could get
required data in seconds. All the fellow owners of schools were super
fascinated.

It took quite a while for him to shift to Excel later as he was super
comfortable with Lotus. Pretty sure before his death deep down he still
preferred Lotus over Excel

~~~
nobleach
In the late 90's I was doing a lot of IT work as a college student. One of my
clients was an accounting firm that was still on a Novell Netware network. All
of their apps were ancient terminal-based programs. Lotus 123 was one of the
most important. I switched them over to a Linux server and NT workstations.
The nightmare of getting captured LPT ports and print-servers configured to
emulate Netware-style print queues was enough for me to lose it most days.
Finally I asked, "why not just use MS Excel?" Then I watched one of the
accountants. He completely flew around Lotus in a way that was inspiring. I
imagine forcing him to learn a new tool would have introduced one heck of a
hinderance to his daily grind. To this day, I have a serious affinity for CLI
apps because of how well that team was able to zip through their work.

------
neilv
One of the most noteworthy things about Mitch Kapor is that he co-founded the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The EFF seemed to be informed and motivated by an understanding of technology,
as well as of history, and progressive American ideals of society/humanity
(freedom of speech, civil rights, innovation, etc.).

I was only a teen at the time, but I got the T-shirt: an EFF retro "Radio Free
Internet" radio tower design.

This was just before the Web, when the Internet and other emerging information
technology was something people wanted to nurture and defend, and bring to
everyone.

When the dotcom valuations started, the influx of money, and of people with
less context and vision, had us acting like unfavorable stereotypes of MBA
students for a long time.

But it seems the EFF hit its stride, and has been keeping it real.

------
ex3xu
I'll suggest the book Dreaming in Code to anyone who wants to learn more about
the history of Mitch Kapor and Lotus, particularly what went wrong with their
attempt at "revolutionary" calendar software Chandler.

[http://www.dreamingincode.com/book-
excerpt/](http://www.dreamingincode.com/book-excerpt/)

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-
picture/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/)

~~~
bonaldi
It's a great read, but also deeply frustrating. I can _feel_ in my bones what
they're aiming for — I loved Agenda, and the _idea_ of Notes is a brilliant
one too, but it seems so frustratingly hard to actually deliver a great
product that delivers on it.

(It's also very easy to criticise Chandler's approach with hindsight, but the
book does a good job of making you appreciate just how much was up in the air
at that point with approaches to building networked applications: see for
example the amount of effort they poured into making it work locally because
the idea of constantly having to chat back to a central server was anathema to
them)

~~~
ex3xu
I share your frustration, and I have nothing but admiration for Mitch Kapor --
he would go on to be one of the founders of the EFF after all.

For me, what causes me the most pain in hindsight is how easily we could have
ended up in a world where Lotus, with its ethically conscious leadership,
could have ended up with the degree of influence on the digital landscape that
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook would eventually have over the
digital world. Just a few million better spent dollars and a few more
groundbreaking products shipped, and who knows...

------
wernsey
My dad once told me a story how in the 80's he was a manager in an engineering
division and wrote up a big spec for a computer system that he wanted IT to
develop that would 'solve all their problems' on these newfangled personal
computers, with ideas from his earlier exposure to mainframes.

So he gave the spec to the IT manager and described what he wanted. When he
finished explaining, the IT manager looked at him puzzled and asked "So you
want Lotus?"

------
mycall
"Sort 1000 names in 14 seconds"

------
meerita
I never fully used Lotus, but I gave it a chance back then when I was in
college. I did all my college work on Quattro Pro for D.O.S 5 and 6 along with
WordStar and later with WordPerfect in Windows. I've used Quattro Pro in
Windows later on too. Ah, those good old days.

~~~
antod
Quattro Pro was a pretty kick ass spreadsheet for a DOS app (graphs, printing
etc), I didn't like going back to 1-2-3 after that.

~~~
meerita
Yeah I loved the graphs. My geography teacher also was amazed to the point my
work is stored in the library of my school.

------
jdsully
Lotus was my introduction to “programming”. It opened my eyes to what a
computer could do. I don’t think it was turing complete and certainly wasn’t
intended to be. But spreadsheets are the one program that exposes the power of
these wonderful machines to the average person.

~~~
mycall
I thought you could do loops in macros, which is part of being turing
complete.

~~~
stan_rogers
Nope. The first Lotus macro/formula language version that allowed loops was in
Notes and Domino 6. Before that, you needed to use Lotusscript (a dialect of
Basic similar to Visual Basic for Applications) or a C API to loop, and that
came along with Windows versions and OLE.

~~~
sagebird
Lotus 1-2-3 had for loops from the beginning, version one even, far before
notes, domino, lotusscript, Windows or OLE/DDE existed. Here is a manual for
version two, page 126 describes the {for} loop.

This wasn’t some hidden feature, lotus macro language was essential to its
success from the beginning and was widely used for automating batch
processing.

[https://www.scribd.com/doc/117872648/Lotus-1-2-3-v2-3-Functi...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/117872648/Lotus-1-2-3-v2-3-Functions-
and-Macros-Guide)

------
raesene9
When I got started in IT in the mid-90's, it was working for an accountancy
office. Lotus 1-2-3 was absolutely the main tool that was used.

The move to Excel happened, due to the simple fact that with every Gateway PC
we bought as we upgraded from DOS based machines to Windows 95 ones, they were
giving away Office Pro for free.

The love of free (as in beer) software was enough to move people from 1-2-3 to
Excel, even though Excel wasn't as good or as stable back then.

------
watchdogtimer
1-2-3 was way too expensive for me back when I was in graduate school, so I
used a shareware clone called 'As Easy As'[1] for the calculations required
for my thesis. It worked great.

It's too bad console-based spreadsheets have fallen out of favor. I still find
them useful for doing quick calculations when using a terminal. My go-to
spreadsheet console app these day is 'sc', which is still available in all the
standard linux repositories. An improved version, sc-im, has multi-level undo
and color support, and is available on github [2] .

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Easy-
As](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Easy-As) [2] -
[https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im](https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im)

------
ilamont
About 7 or 8 years ago, the city of Cambridge publicly celebrated the opening
of an innovation plaza next to the Kendall Red Line stop. They had sidewalk
plaques of innovators, some of whom were on hand to accept the honor. Kapor
was one of them. I can't remember what he said, but what did stick with me was
a respectable group of Lotus alumni who showed up to applaud him, many wearing
Lotus jackets or other company attire. It was like a cult - they were
obviously very tight and loyal to him and the company, even though it was long
gone by then.

------
ngcc_hk
Love visicalc but multiplan more. 1-2-3 is just work.

~~~
UncleSlacky
No love for Lotus Jazz?

------
sne11ius
It's a shame the audio is so bad. Would love me a polished version...

Oh that's your new side project right there: a browser plugin that does this
on the fly. With ai. And put something something block chain in for the 2017
retro vibes ;)

~~~
agumonkey
There's a massive business for audio correction on the web. I find it almost
hysterical to have a 1080p conference video with a blurry slide and a dark
speaker and cannot hear clearly. Radio is a better medium.

~~~
sagebird
I’m interested in presentation detection and enhancement in general. For
example, if a person is standing in front of a mostly static chalkboard for an
hour, there is a ton of information there about the writing on the board. The
frames could be fed into a handwriting detector and perhaps vectorized, and
the video format should understand this and transmit a full resolution
chalkboard on frame zero of the transmission, and not send any board info
until there is an actual modification.

------
gdcohen
Interesting how far spreadsheets have come since 1983 and, just as
interesting, how much presentation tools and techniques have changed in the
same time period!

~~~
ghaff
Presentation tools have changed much more than spreadsheets. Mid-80s Lotus
1-2-3 is perfectly adequate for anything I use a spreadsheet for today given I
don’t use pivot tables or macros.

By contrast, presentation software in Windows (and to some degree Mac) was
fundamentally different. Various DOS and other programs of the same era were
basically just a way to create some bullet points and graphs. Functional but
not much more.

~~~
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
A lot of what makes Excel fantastic are the quality of life changes. The data
capabilities, the formatting options, the formula auditing. Simply being able
to convert to table is a absolute massive time saver.

------
spydertennis
legend

