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.
> 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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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:)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
> No downloads in those days.
For the 1% with the required hardware, was there a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system ?
There might have been, but I don't think I ever needed to give it out or was asked for it.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Quattro pro was the bomb
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:)
Such an awesome blog.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoy it.
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 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.