5 ms·

I am aware of a very large company that still uses Lotus 123 for hundreds of millions of dollars of business.

by etothepii 4y ago

xattt 4y ago
Is it a TUI version of 1-2-3?
- etothepii 4y ago
  No it's the GUI version. Last updated in 2002.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    Is it IBM? :)
    - etothepii 4y ago
      Ha! No, but it was sold by IBM.
d0mine 4y ago
You might be surprised how efficient in practice it can be. Often, new software can be a net negative on productivity. Emacs is the most productive environment (for me) and it is half a century old.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  But unlike 1-2-3, Emacs is still being developed.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  I have used Lotus 1-2-3 for about 5 years, until switching to Windows 95, where the GUI version of 1-2-3 no longer had significant advantages over MS Excel. There is no doubt that for any tasks simple enough to have their speed limited by the interaction with the user, and not by waiting for a very large number of cells to be recomputed or by the execution time of a long macro, the MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 on an 80386 CPU was faster than MS Excel or any other modern spreadsheet program on a modern computer with a CPU having a one hundred times higher clock frequency. Lotus 1-2-3 had a well-designed menu-driven user interface and the keyboard shortcuts needed to execute quickly all menu commands became automatic in a short time for anyone who used the program daily, and they were easy to discover for novice users. In the recent versions of MS Office, the menu structure has become very opaque for me, even if I have used it for decades, since its first version. I may need some minutes to discover in which submenu a seldom-used command can be found, because the distribution of the commands over the menu hierarchy no longer makes sense for me, even if I know that the command must exist, because I had used it in some older version of MS Office, where it was located in a completely different submenu.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    > where the GUI version of 1-2-3 no longer had significant advantages over MS Excel. There was a preference that for some reason was off by default that enabled / commands, so that you could use the GUI version just like the old DOS version. My dad did that for years when his company forced him to switch to GUI 1-2-3, until they finally forced him to switch to Excel.
- jasonm23 4y ago
  When Yegge was at Amazon he set up a bunch of office admin systems in Emacs. Office admin staff hated the web based alternatives when they were rolled out (According to Yegge.)

I am aware of a very large company that still uses Lotus 123 for hundreds of millions of dollars of business.

xattt 4y ago

Is it a TUI version of 1-2-3?

etothepii 4y ago
No it's the GUI version. Last updated in 2002.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Is it IBM? :)
  - etothepii 4y ago
    Ha! No, but it was sold by IBM.

d0mine 4y ago

You might be surprised how efficient in practice it can be. Often, new software can be a net negative on productivity. Emacs is the most productive environment (for me) and it is half a century old.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago
But unlike 1-2-3, Emacs is still being developed.
adrian_b 4y ago
I have used Lotus 1-2-3 for about 5 years, until switching to Windows 95, where the GUI version of 1-2-3 no longer had significant advantages over MS Excel. There is no doubt that for any tasks simple enough to have their speed limited by the interaction with the user, and not by waiting for a very large number of cells to be recomputed or by the execution time of a long macro, the MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 on an 80386 CPU was faster than MS Excel or any other modern spreadsheet program on a modern computer with a CPU having a one hundred times higher clock frequency. Lotus 1-2-3 had a well-designed menu-driven user interface and the keyboard shortcuts needed to execute quickly all menu commands became automatic in a short time for anyone who used the program daily, and they were easy to discover for novice users. In the recent versions of MS Office, the menu structure has become very opaque for me, even if I have used it for decades, since its first version. I may need some minutes to discover in which submenu a seldom-used command can be found, because the distribution of the commands over the menu hierarchy no longer makes sense for me, even if I know that the command must exist, because I had used it in some older version of MS Office, where it was located in a completely different submenu.
- jedberg 4y ago
  > where the GUI version of 1-2-3 no longer had significant advantages over MS Excel. There was a preference that for some reason was off by default that enabled / commands, so that you could use the GUI version just like the old DOS version. My dad did that for years when his company forced him to switch to GUI 1-2-3, until they finally forced him to switch to Excel.
jasonm23 4y ago
When Yegge was at Amazon he set up a bunch of office admin systems in Emacs. Office admin staff hated the web based alternatives when they were rolled out (According to Yegge.)