Discussion, talk and tips
https://forum.puppylinux.com/
Cfraenkel October 6, 2022 at 2:21 pm
Lotus 123 has been resurrected from the grave. You can get it running natively under linux.
https://github.com/taviso/123elf
There’s an interesting backstory to the resuscitation, if you’re into that sort of thing:
Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively
Wow Flash, what an interesting find! 
I built it and it really runs!
My absolute favorite software to use during the good old days of DOS. Does Excel really have 30 years of improvements over 1-2-3? I don't think so.
Such a long time ago. How useful or good is it as a commandline spreadsheet today? Compared to say sc spreadsheet. I'd like a good commandline low-resource spreadsheet, but it isn't clear to me thus far if old lotus 1-2-3 is anything but an interesting relic. But maybe it is more than that - any details about resource usage and overall functionality to see if it is more than just a novelty from the past?
Sounded like it was a lot of effort for the developer to get it working - I can't help but wonder what the point in the end is though. I'd be happy to hear it was actually useful though.
Perhaps I'm just not really into nostalgia when it comes to computers and their software. I once used a commodore Pet machine (the truly famous Visicalc), BBC Acorn and Atom or whatever they were called, and Sinclair MkII, and Spectrum and so on - and even a Sun Unix pizzabox machine (whatever it was officially called), but I'd have no interest in any of them today. Come to think of it: DOS Symphony spreadsheet/word-processor (and more) - used to program in electronic's 'experiments' in Symphony spreadsheet (Lissajous figures and tuned circuits and so on). And once used Puppy 2.17 and thought it was great to use back then - but no interest in that old interface today either... Just dead technology most of it, that no-one cares about later. Unlike the bicycle which remains much the same (even if driven by electric motor sometimes nowadays). Life is too short already to waste time on resurrecting dead old stuff and marveling that it still works. Bring back the floppy disk and data on cassette tapes - NOT.
re: old spreadsheets:
https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic ... 3Bstart=15
But from above link also see: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
http://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm
OK, so Lotus 1-2-3 seems pretty good, like DOS Symphony was I suppose...
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/spreadsheet.html
Definitely a complete waste of time though!!!
We were running VisiCalc well before 1-2-3. I remember the IBM-PC seemed a conservative step backwards, with an 8088, when we'd already been running an 8/16 bit Z-80 machine at 5.3 mHz, with FORTH wp and db applications, The PC was kind of an enforced business disappointment. Shortly even a consumer level Amiga was running an 16/32 bit MC68000 cpu.
So is anyone going to post a compiled and stripped binary or dotpet for Lotus 1-2-3 to see how big it is? Potentially pretty useful since Lotus made it quite nicely user-friendly.
@wiak I'll see if I can build the most efficient stripped binary possible. Though jamesbond already has a version compiled.
@vtpup Their reasoning for the 8088 was that they wanted 16-bit processing, but they knew most peripherals at that time were 8-bit. So they used the 8088 for this reason. They thought if they made it easier to get peripherals, they would sell more. And they still had the 16-bit internally.
It will be great if they make a linux version of Lotus Organizer which I still use with Wine. I ripped the organizer files from a very old version Lotus 1-2-3 full suite install and repacked it as a standalone Lotus Organizer sfs-addon. viewtopic.php?p=13002#p13002
I got the binary (compiled in Fatdog) at 1397K after being stripped. There are some additonal files that are installed that come to about 3.5M. Converting it all to a sfs comes to 1280K. The binary does run on its own though.
For me, this is one of the best dead all stuff that should be resurrected for Puppy or EasyOS.
Best regards,
Reynaldo