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.
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.
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.
The last part when Excel is entering the story, brings memories of Joel Spolosky, AKA founder of Stack Overflow and other companies, who was one of the early team members of Excel development ---
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
and as stated there
The only thing that made it look reasonable was
that it looked great compared to Lotus macros,
which were nothing more than a sequence of
keystrokes entered as a long string into a
worksheet cell.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 :-)
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.
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.
The first computer class I took in high school was the pre-Office triumvirate: WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and dBase. Loved it, then took another class the next year, thinking it was a continuation of the same, but turns out it was a basic computer science course, where we learned Turbo Pascal. The rest is history as they say.
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 worked at Arthur Andersen when Lotus 1-2-3 came out. It was like crack to accountants. VisiCalc was in use but this took it to a whole new level.
One of my jobs was making bootleg copies so everybody could have a copy, until the NY office was busted and they paid out enough to incentivize them to buy copies as needed.
I consider this period of time to be a watershed moment for humanity: prior to this, a lot of business was run on notions and assumptions. With powerful spreadsheets and macros businesses could play "what if" and turn the whole affair into a profit/loss scenario (including labor, e.g., people) and think of businesses simply as a pile of numbers where they only care about maximizing the bottom line.
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.
I love old computing like this. Games are fun and all, but it's always nice to see the more professional side of things. I'm particularly fond of CP/M despite not exactly liking the CP/M style of operating systems and their ilk (MS/PCDOS and NT)
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!
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.
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!
Quattro pro was the bomb
Lotus 1-2-3 on PC Jr cartridge in the era before widespread availability of hard drives was the only good thing about that awful platform
Lotus sold for 1.8B in 2018?
Yes, used it on MS-DOS 3.3, until getting hold of Works for MS-DOS.
> flood fill
Finally a leet code application I recognize
The "one of the greatest inventions in computing" framing holds up when you look at what it actually did to financial math accessibility.
I've been implementing the functions Lotus 1-2-3 made mainstream as a REST API — amortization, NPV, IRR, compound interest — and the formulas are completely unchanged from 1983. Forty years of software evolution and the computation at the bottom has been stable the entire time.
What changed is only the interface layer: mainframe COBOL → Lotus cells → Excel formulas → Python libraries → REST endpoints. The spreadsheet era was the step that made financial math legible to non-programmers. Everything since has just been a different packaging of the same numbers.
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