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> Already Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, more than 30 years ago, matched or exceeded almost all features provided today by MS Excel Only someone who isn’t a heavy use

> Already Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, more than 30 years ago, matched or exceeded almost all features provided today by MS Excel Only someone who isn’t a heavy user of Excel could say this.. the improvements really aren’t trivial.

adrian_b 3y ago
Actually I have been both a heavy user of Lotus 1-2-3 in Antiquity and a heavy user of Excel in recent times. It is obvious that a program which may have a size of many megabytes is able to include a lot of improvements over a program whose size was limited to a few hundred kilobytes. Nevertheless, all improvements provided by Excel are quantitative not qualitative, they do not enable any essentially new application. For instance, there is no doubt that it is much easier to write a maintainable Excel script in Basic, than in the awkward macro language of Lotus 1-2-3. Even so, using just the macro language of Lotus 1-2-3, it was possible to write amazingly complex applications, e.g. for the automation of the tracking in real time and of the generation of reports about the flow of partially processed products through the steps of complex technological processes in some factories (with thousands of different products and with more than one hundred manufacturing process steps through which they might have to pass, depending on the part number), also of the printing of all the documents that accompanied the manufacturing batches, and where the data was stored in a database embedded in the spreadsheets. Today, writing such a program by using a modern database, a modern programming language and a modern computer would be very easy, but doing the same within 640 kB and with a 33 MHz CPU was not a little accomplishment. At that time, Lotus 1-2-3 was one of the most useful applications for most businesses, especially when computers and programs were much less affordable and many would not have been able to buy any other program, except perhaps some word processor. Excel has taken all the features of Lotus 1-2-3, except the user interface, which was no longer suitable in Windows, but everything added later were just enhancements that were obvious when faster CPUs and more memory became available.

adrian_b 3y ago

Actually I have been both a heavy user of Lotus 1-2-3 in Antiquity and a heavy user of Excel in recent times. It is obvious that a program which may have a size of many megabytes is able to include a lot of improvements over a program whose size was limited to a few hundred kilobytes. Nevertheless, all improvements provided by Excel are quantitative not qualitative, they do not enable any essentially new application. For instance, there is no doubt that it is much easier to write a maintainable Excel script in Basic, than in the awkward macro language of Lotus 1-2-3. Even so, using just the macro language of Lotus 1-2-3, it was possible to write amazingly complex applications, e.g. for the automation of the tracking in real time and of the generation of reports about the flow of partially processed products through the steps of complex technological processes in some factories (with thousands of different products and with more than one hundred manufacturing process steps through which they might have to pass, depending on the part number), also of the printing of all the documents that accompanied the manufacturing batches, and where the data was stored in a database embedded in the spreadsheets. Today, writing such a program by using a modern database, a modern programming language and a modern computer would be very easy, but doing the same within 640 kB and with a 33 MHz CPU was not a little accomplishment. At that time, Lotus 1-2-3 was one of the most useful applications for most businesses, especially when computers and programs were much less affordable and many would not have been able to buy any other program, except perhaps some word processor. Excel has taken all the features of Lotus 1-2-3, except the user interface, which was no longer suitable in Windows, but everything added later were just enhancements that were obvious when faster CPUs and more memory became available.