Yea, but who remembers WordStar, & VisiCalc?

[balrog]

https://hackaday.com/2022/05/23/lotus-123-for-linux-is-like-a-digital-treasure-hunt/

 

[passedpawn]

Yep, remember it well. It was said that Lotus 123 was written entirely in assembly language (ouch!). This would make it VERY hard to port to another machine.

Never used wordstar, but I was a diehard wordperfect user until Windows 3 came along and I switched to Word (and WYSIWYG, haha, remember that term when it meant something novel?)

 

[balrog]

Wow. I only ever used assembly in college and then as subroutine to program VESA modes to make shaded images of golf ball dimple patterns when I worked at Spalding Sports. Funniest thing I remember about assembly language was an early meme on shooting yourself in the foot in different computer languages when "object oriented" was exploding on the scene.

God I'm old.

 

[bracconiere]

I remember Lotus (esprie turbo, for the amiga) AND 123...


And my first OS was GeoWorks Ensemble! (damn i hated that GUI!)

but i'm just a whipper snapper, and was only 14-15 at the time....


edit: and who remembers 4DOS?

 

[balrog]

4DOS and DR-DOS.

Heck, I remember looking at PC DOS in assembly when the whole dang OS was about 30K. Sigh. Those were the days.

 

[Broothru]

Yep, remember it well. It was said that Lotus 123 was written entirely in assembly language (ouch!). This would make it VERY hard to port to another machine.

Never used wordstar, but I was a diehard wordperfect user until Windows 3 came along and I switched to Word (and WYSIWYG, haha, remember that term when it meant something novel?)

"Assembly language" ??!!??

I just had an attack of PTSD. Thank God for WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get").

 

[balrog]

"Assembly language" ??!!??

I just had an attack of PTSD. Thank God for WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get").

Hah. Yep. Keying in the instructions on the front of a PDP10, with just enough code to turn on and read/load/run the more voluminous code on a piece of startup tape through the tape reader (hi tech because finally not punch paper tape), in order to get to a starting point where a rudimentary OS could then be loaded.

Make one keying mistake and all hell breaks loose. Typically followed by pulling the massive (physically) sized memory card with an unbelievably HUGE amount of memory, like maybe even 2K, and running a pencil eraser across the contacts to get to work better.

And you try to tell the kids how it was in the old days, and they don't believe ya.

 

[MaxStout]

I remember using WordPerfect a lot, as that was the de facto word processing app used in the legal profession at the time, despite most everyone else using MS-Word.

WP was easier to create documents in outline, which was the format of much of the docs we drafted (the bullets, indents, footnotes, etc., stayed where you wanted them). Word tended to move stuff around unless you turned off a bunch of default settings.

 

[Dr_Jeff]

Yep, wordstar, Lotus 123 was the most common spreadsheet package and Word Perfect was either loved or hated.

I started with a CPM machine a Kaypro 2 with 64k of memory, with two 360k double sided floppy disk drives.
One of the original portable computers, it was the size of a portable sewing machine and weighed about as much.
I remember the sales person saying "It has 64K of memory, all the memory you will ever need."

I also had a 9-pin printer. And a bit later got a 300 baud manual dial modem, it didn't need an acoustic coupler, one would dial the number on the phone and when you heard the whistle, flip a switch on the modem and hang up the phone, then tap the enter key a couple of times and would get a login prompt to a BBS.

 

[IslandLizard]

Yeah, I too love WP! Still do.

Having its own macro language (it's C-like), still makes it the most powerful word processor ever built, IMO.
Over the years I've written 100,000s of lines of WP macro code, up till 2013. Customized keyboards, menus, UI buttons, invoking other programs from within, importing databases, creating batches of 1000's of PDFs in Acrobat Server, virtually limitless and flawless.

I simply hate M$ Word... a necessary evil. As in many cases, the best didn't win here either...

Never toyed much with 123, half my job was word processor oriented.

Before PCs became common office good, we had a Lanier/AES dedicated console word processor with 8 terminals. This was state of the art, then, word processing-wise. It had a whopping 64MB of centralized hard disk space. Backups of that took 1.5 hours, every morning, on 16MB pizza sized hard platter cartridges.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

 

[Broothru]

Yep, wordstar, Lotus 123 was the most common spreadsheet package and Word Perfect was either loved or hated.

I started with a CPM machine a Kaypro 2 with 64k of memory, with two 360k double sided floppy disk drives.
One of the original portable computers, it was the size of a portable sewing machine and weighed about as much.
I remember the sales person saying "It has 64K of memory, all the memory you will ever need."

I also had a 9-pin printer. And a bit later got a 300 baud manual dial modem, it didn't need an acoustic coupler, one would dial the number on the phone and when you heard the whistle, flip a switch on the modem and hang up the phone, then tap the enter key a couple of times and would get a login prompt to a BBS.

Wow! You're makin' me all misty-eyed and nostalgic. Or NOT....

I felt like I was really chopping tall cotton when I ditched the acoustic coupler and got 300 baud. My AOL account was never the same. Had to pop for a P/S-2 from IBM with a 20 Meg hard drive and 2K of RAM!!!

Who could ever NEED that much power? I did worry for quite some time that there was only ONE floppy drive, but at least it held 750K of backup. Who'd ever use 1.4MB on a floppy?

 

[renstyle]

Mmmm, VC on the classic Apple II. Then AppleWorks.

The first versions of 1-2-3 were alot faster, tho mostly due to the PC hardware it ran on, including more RAM.

Speaking of PTSD, how about futzing with the AutoEXEC.bat and Config.sys files to make the most of that Expanded (EMS) memory that Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft dreamed up to get past 640k?

 

[renstyle]

edit: and who remembers 4DOS?

I was aware of 4DOS's existence, but never used it.

OTOH, I used DOS/4GW extensively when I was actively playing DOOM-esque games.

 

[renstyle]

https://hackaday.com/2022/05/23/lotus-123-for-linux-is-like-a-digital-treasure-hunt/

Interesting that they have ported 1-2-3 to run natively on Linux...

In the past I've directed a few of my Raspberry Pi v3.0 to play with this project: Dosbian

granted you're not running DOS on bare metal, it's all virtualized in DOSbox, but you can use cheap hardware and you can play with the original version

 

[matt_m]

I used 123 on DOS just a little early in college but Quattro Pro came on strong and was the de facto standard by the time I graduated with Excel emerging.

 

[renstyle]

I used 123 on DOS just a little early in college but Quattro Pro came on strong and was the de facto standard by the time I graduated with Excel emerging.

I seem to recall Quattro Pro being one of the first spreadsheet programs to take full advantage of math co-processors.

Those things really made a difference with 8088 and 286 processors, especially with AutoCAD (watching the space shuttle wireframe stock drawing re-render with the co-pro on/off was a real eye-opener).

Granted it was a moot point by the time 486DX chips were coming out in 1989...

 

[passedpawn]

I seem to recall Quattro Pro being one of the first spreadsheet programs to take full advantage of math co-processors.

Those things really made a difference with 8088 and 286 processors, especially with AutoCAD (watching the space shuttle wireframe stock drawing re-render with the co-pro on/off was a real eye-opener).

Granted it was a moot point by the time 486DX chips were coming out in 1989...

And then the Pentium ("586") would introduce the infamous floating point bug into the processor hardware. It actually affected almost no one, but intel handled it badly and had to issue a recall of the processor.

 

[renstyle]

And then the Pentium ("586") would introduce the infamous floating point bug into the processor hardware. It actually affected almost no one, but intel handled it badly and had to issue a recall of the processor.

I still have a 60Mhz Pentium with that bug! It runs at the full 5 volts so it's quite a good room warmer LOL!

Honestly I didn't know during the time I was running Windows on it, but my first boot of Linux and it was right there in the message log.

 

[renstyle]

Obligatory follow-up question: to those in this thread, how comfortable are you with folks being on your lawn?

 

[passedpawn]

I still have a 60Mhz Pentium with that bug! It runs at the full 5 volts so it's quite a good room warmer LOL!

Honestly I didn't know during the time I was running Windows on it, but my first boot of Linux and it was right there in the message log.

Test for the bug!

https://faculty.lynchburg.edu/~nicely/pentbug/bugmail1.html

 

[balrog]

STAY OFF! And take the grubs, Grackles, crows, neighborhood cats, chipmunks, tree rats, dandelions and dogs with you.

 

[balrog]

Test for the bug!

https://faculty.lynchburg.edu/~nicely/pentbug/bugmail1.html
View attachment 769948

I loved when the 8087 came out. It was so awesome.

 

[Broothru]

Mmmm, VC on the classic Apple II. Then AppleWorks.

The first versions of 1-2-3 were alot faster, tho mostly due to the PC hardware it ran on, including more RAM.

Speaking of PTSD, how about futzing with the AutoEXEC.bat and Config.sys files to make the most of that Expanded (EMS) memory that Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft dreamed up to get past 640k?

More than 640K of RAM? That's just silly talk!

And you ALWAYS had to have current autoEXEC.bat and config.sys files on an emergency boot disk.

How I long for the days of AM radio, doing points & plugs and oil changes every 2,000 miles, and "gas wars" meaning you could 'fill 'er up' for less than $5.00 of ethyl.

On second thought, scratch everything except the $.20 per gallon fuel. On our last trip we paid over $130 twice (22 gallons each time) to fill The Zephyr with diesel ️ . Ouch!

 

[renstyle]

Man, is it good or bad that I know what points are? Or ethyl By the time I rolled around in the late 70s it was just "regular" next to "unleaded".

More than a few times padre filled up the '79 K5 blazer with Regular, even tho it CLEARLY stated "Unleaded Fuel only". I'm sure the fumes slowed us all down a bit cognitively, so I'm glad the lead is (mostly) gone.

Wish that price would have stuck around tho!

 

[cmac62]

you could 'fill 'er up' for less than $5.00 of ethyl.

What's ethyl? LOL

 

[Broothru]

What's ethyl? LOL

Ethel Mertz. She was married to Fred. They were Ricky Ricardo's next door neighbors. "You got a lotta 'splainin' to do around here, Lucy...."

 

[day_trippr]

fwiw, back in the stone age of IBM mainframe implementation I had to write system diagnostics in machine language - a lower level than assembly which is essentially a symbolic construct. I carried around a suitcase full of card decks to test things like ALUs, instruction decoders, memory, storage protection arrays, etc.

Looking back at some of the stuff we literally depended on working seems borderline insane to me now. Woof!

Cheers!

 

[passedpawn]

fwiw, back in the stone age of IBM mainframe implementation I had to write system diagnostics in machine language - a lower level than assembly which is essentially a symbolic construct. I carried around a suitcase full of card decks to test things like ALUs, instruction decoders, memory, storage protection arrays, etc.

Looking back at some of the stuff we literally depended on working seems borderline insane to me now. Woof!

Cheers!

machine code is no different, line by line, than assembly. It's a harder way of doing it, but line-by-line it's identical to assembly.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

fwiw, back in the stone age of IBM mainframe implementation I had to write system diagnostics in machine language - a lower level than assembly which is essentially a symbolic construct. I carried around a suitcase full of card decks to test things like ALUs, instruction decoders, memory, storage protection arrays, etc.

Looking back at some of the stuff we literally depended on working seems borderline insane to me now. Woof!

Cheers!

Agreed, mainframe computers, below the published 'machine language', seem boardline insane.

"Macro" assembly languages (assembly with macro substitution) take boarderline insane in a different direction. With the right set of macros, one can write "structured" assembly language (no gotos jump instructions). And yes, a line of text in a macro assembler would generate zero or more machine instructions.