Lotus 1-2-3 was a very good spreadsheet utility in the DOS and early Windows days.

mrau wrote:

how much use is lotus now compared to excel and co?
i suppose it was very primitive? it says 3 analytical functions on the box..
how much data could one process in this?

Lotus 1-2-3 was a very progressive piece of software for its time that could easily outdo Microsoft Multiplan and other spreadsheet programs. Most businesses used it extensively as it was the defacto standard and as popular as Excel is today. It was kind of limited by the average memory size of home computers back then. It was only able to process spreadsheets with 256 columns by 8192 rows which isn't that bad but sounds a little ancient compared to almost unlimited sizes of nowadays Excel sheets.

the lotus eater

appiah4 wrote:

Lotus 1-2-3 was a very good spreadsheet utility in the DOS and early Windows days.

Lotus suite was used by allot of corporations in 1990’s because lotus would sell you a corporate license.
Where as Microjunk would NOT.

I use Quattro pro at home because it was inexpensive compared to excel.
I think Excel was about $100

Lotus GraphWriter II (Release 1.0)

Got one of my more desired items, Borland Pascal with Objects 7.0 (a.k.a. the "professional" version of Turbo Pascal 7.0).

Only missing the Turbo Debugger manual, and I think a smaller Turbo Assembler quick reference manual. But I have both of the Borland C++ 4.0 equivalent manuals so, meh.

Surprisingly all of the disks read completely. Only had some minor issue with disk #1 at first, but tried wiping down the inner magnetic part with a Q-tip + 99% alcohol and that actually fixed the read error (first time I've ever had that method actually work). Promptly backed up all of the disks. Yeah, Winworld has them too, but it's kind of nice knowing I made my own copy. 😜

EDIT: Oh, I guess I should also note that this was not the 7.01 version that fixed issues with 386 longint SHL/SHR code, so that bug is present in my copy.

I work in software development and keep old outdated software and books on my shelf to see who notices. A few people usually do.

I received a copy of Frontpage 2002 which more or less completes my Office 2002 collection.

blurks wrote:

I received a copy of Frontpage 2002 which more or less completes my Office 2002 collection.

Awesome collection!

I used to love building web pages with FrontPage. It felt so powerful to younger-me.
(Nowadays I cannot stand using anything with a WYSIWYG HTML editor.)

Very nice Office collection there! 😀

NAM still on sale, can't believe my eyes!

Received a copy of Windows 2000 Professional. Now thinking about the Advanced Server... hmm...

My copy of DeluxePaint II Enhanced (DOS version) arrived today.

Unfortunately, I could tell, even from the sellers photos that there was probably a good chance that the disks would not work. Some of the inside packaging and the papers included showed signs of discolouration around the edges, etc. which would seem to indicate to me what the storage conditions would have been like for this for the past decades. Sure enough, upon inspection of both of these disks once they arrived I could immediately see that the inside surface on both was full of bits of dirt and many, many "splotches" like this:

(sorry, not the best photo, but in the center of the open shutter there is a visible dirty area)

Anyway, I decided I was not going to put these disks in any of my drives until I gave them a gentle scrubbing with Q-tips and 99% alcohol. Dunno if that was the right call or not, but in the end it did work ... !

But I now need to clean the heads of the disk drive I used for these. It was making some sad sounds while copying the contents. 😐

That is mold and you did the right thing by cleaning them with alcohol.

Just a bunch of old stuff to try out my 486 computer.

More photos

Office XP Standard, new in box. ($18).

Some loose 5.25" floppies of MS-DOS 5.0 and MS-DOS 6.2 Step-up for my 8088. ($5)

Bought a few boxed OSes (and a GUI) recently:

• Acer-branded MS OS/2, it’s an early version
• IBM DOS 2.00
• IBM Topview - really interested to get this up and running on a 5160
• Novell DOS 7 - apparently upgrades DR DOS 6.x which I will need to track down if it doesn’t install

Found some different versions of Office Standard for under $20 each so I grabbed them.