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This is interesting! My first exposure to Unix was in 1990 when my mother worked for a law firm in California. Everyone had dumb terminals on their desks connec
by geocrasher 4y ago
This is interesting! My first exposure to Unix was in 1990 when my mother worked for a law firm in California. Everyone had dumb terminals on their desks connected to a very very large tower computer in the server room. I don't remember anything about it (I was only about 14) except that it said Santa Cruz operations Unix on it.
And of course, at her desk I could see my mom log into her Unix account and launch WordPerfect with wp. I was blown away! There was also a spreadsheet application but I have to admit that I don't remember what it was. It was probably Lotus 123 but I don't know if it was ported to Unix or not.
Little did I know that I would be making a living with Linux all these years later!
- cafard 4y agoMy recollection is that WordPerfect Office on minicomputers had its own spreadsheet application. Wikipedia says "PlanPerfect". By now I don't remember.
- taviso 4y ago123 was indeed ported to UNIX, I have that working as well! https://github.com/taviso/123elf https://github.com/taviso/123elf (Although it was more likely procalc - a popular low-end lotus clone) I'm also working on porting dBase IV, another popular package from the era :)
- skissane 4y ago> 123 was indeed ported to UNIX I keep on hoping that some day the IBM mainframe port (MVS and VM/CMS) might turn up. It was further away from the DOS original than the UNIX port was, due to the changes required by 3270 block mode terminals.
- unixhero 4y agoThat is a darn fine spreadsheet in the console. I am tempted to try it!
- alchemist1e9 4y agoImagine all the great commercial code lost to time. There should be a historical preservation movement to try and find the source code for old abandoned applications like this.
- skissane 4y ago> Imagine all the great commercial code lost to time. There should be a historical preservation movement to try and find the source code for old abandoned applications like this. One of these days, an AI is going to be able to construct realistic-looking source code which compiles to an identical binary using contemporaneous tools. It may become very hard to tell the genuine vintage source code apart from the AI deepfake decompilation
- walterbell 4y agoThanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31455968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31455968 Lotus Agenda for DOS is unmatched to this day, despite an epic reboot catastrophe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Applications_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Applications_Found... The mission of the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) was.. Carry forward the vision of Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and Ted Nelson of the computer as a medium for communication, collaboration, and coordination. Design a new application to manage personal information including notes, mail, tasks, appointments and events, contacts, documents and other personal resources. Enable sharing with colleagues, friends and family. In particular, meet the unique and under-served needs of small group collaboration. EccoPro (successor to Agenda) for Windows works on Apple Silicon Macs via Wine/Crossover, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro & https://groups.io/g/EccoPro https://groups.io/g/EccoPro
- nurettin 4y agoI wonder what they used instead of outlook
- tablespoon 4y ago> I wonder what they used instead of outlook Maybe something like Pine? Even into Web 1.0 days, it was still pretty common for people to use. Everyone in my high school accessed their school-provided email account by telnetting into a Unix server and accessing Pine via a menu system.
- pjmlp 4y agoAh that brings back memories.
- technicalbard 4y agoI used elm before pine, on a terminal hooked to a Bull-Honeywell machine running Multics...
- unixhero 4y agoWell Lotus had email at one point. But before it did, Unix sendmail!
- skissane 4y agoWordPerfect had email too. Novell bought GroupWise from WordPerfect. Before the Novell acquisition, it was called WordPerfect Office, and before that WordPerfect Library. It was available for DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX (SCO Xenix, AT&T 3B2, NCR TOWER), OS/2, VAX/VMS, and Data General minicomputers. Confusingly, Corel now sells "WordPerfect Office" which is nothing to do with the original WordPerfect Office. The current "WordPerfect Office" is an office suite composed of WordPerfect (word processor), Quattro Pro (spreadsheet, acquired from Borland), and a few other apps. The original "WordPerfect Office" was not an office suite, it was a groupware suite, with email, calendaring, document management, etc. And GroupWise is still around, but now called Micro Focus GroupWise, since Attachmate bought Novell and then Micro Focus bought Attachmate. And more recently, Micro Focus has been bought by OpenText. I wonder how many people still use it though. I remember when everybody was jumping ship from GroupWise – 15+ years ago. If everyone was abandoning something 15 years ago, who is left today? Addendum: Someone on Reddit claims [0] there is only one large GroupWise customer remaining – US Federal Bureau of Prisons. If true, makes sense – where else but some government agency would something like this survive? [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tlwvsd/anyone_else_still_using_groupwise/i1w237q/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tlwvsd/anyone_els...
- gattilorenz 4y agoSince it was running on SCO, the spreadsheet could have been Microsoft Multiplan, competitor of VisiCalc… Microsoft Excel before Excel :)
- ArteEtMarte 4y agoOh, Multiplan was horrible. As a SCO Unix and MS Xenix developer, I remember having to write lots of nasty little programs in C to do stuff with it and its files, just to make it usable. It had a terrible trick of writing multiple documents to the same file.