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Lotus 1-2-3 Ported To Linux - Slashdot

 2 years ago
source link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/05/30/1633208/lotus-1-2-3-ported-to-linux
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Lotus 1-2-3 Ported To Linux

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Lotus 1-2-3 Ported To Linux (techradar.com) 26

Posted by msmash

on Monday May 30, 2022 @12:33PM from the moving-forward dept.
Lotus-1-2-3, an ancient spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (and later IBM), has been ported to a new operating system. drewsup writes: As reported by The Register, a Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast called Tavis Ormandy (who is also a bug-hunter for Google Project Zero), managed to successfully port the program onto Linux, which seems to be quite the feat of reverse engineering. It's important to stress that this isn't an emulated program, but rather the original 1990 Lotus 1-2 -- for x86 Unix running natively on modern x86 Linux.

›

aren't POSIX-compliant programs written in C reasonably easy to port between UNIX/Linux? I'd imagine that it's mostly a matter of figuring out what few libraries aren't included on the newer OS that also need to be ported.

The last release of Lotus 1-2-3 came out more than twenty years ago. The version in the story came out long enough ago that someone could have started a career, worked that career, and retired with a pension before this port has been released.

I guess it's mildly interesting to some, but this is pretty damn niche even for Slashdot.

  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Monday May 30, 2022 @12:51PM (#62577580)

    https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/lot... [cmpxchg8b.com]

    more than mildly interestting, I'd love a spreadsheet without the bloat for large piles of data

    • Re:

      Gnumeric perhaps?

      Spreadsheets are very misused by people who don't realize that what they are doing with them is programming. But its a progamming without comments and without any structured subroutines, and absolutely full of go-to's.

      Classic misuse is in models that give input into major investment decisions at big companies, where there seems to be the assumption that more detail means more accuracy means better forecasts. And actually the key points on which the forecasts turn are buried in a formula i

      • Re:

        Gnumeric is a bit chunky and its behavior on pressing enter is not very slick. I use Excel '97 when I need a simple spreadsheet, it works very well and has a lot of features but remains very light weight.

        • Re:

          I've been the "excel guru" for the past 20 years in various 1st tier consulting/accounting companies...

          I've also had the fortune/misfortune of using Lotus 123 (pretty recently actually)

          I'd argue that Lotus, when compared with the most recent versions of excel, is actually superior in most respects though there's a bit of a learning curve as the formulas/entry is different

          That said, I'd never recommend it because no one else uses it generally speaking - I've only "upgraded" from excel 2003 to 2010 (i.e., the

      • Re:

        As an avid spreadsheet user and mediocre (being kind) programmer, I completely agree... BUT the reason why the spreadsheets are used is varying levels of detail are available and are easy to check. I did a project for a major bank that was to determine a path for $multi-Billions and multiple decades where our work product included about 500 pages of spreadsheet data. There was a team of about 10 people who checked our work on the bank's side, and even re-worked the information.

        The key to using spreadsheet

    • Re:

      Perhaps a decade ago, I booted up an old Apple II that my mother-in-law had purchased way back in the day (she handled most of the business side of the family farm). One of the programs she'd purchased with the computer was Microsoft's Multiplan, which I believe was the predecessor to Excel.

      I fooled around with it for a little while, and found it interesting that this early 80s application seemed to offer pretty much all of the basic features the majority of people likely need a spreadsheet for. In (now) 40

  • Re:

    The version in the story came out long enough ago that someone could have started a career, worked that career, and retired with a pension before this port has been released.

    Working for the government maybe. I started my career in 1988 and I'll be lucky if I can retire in another 10 years.

  • Re:

    Yes source code is generally portable. However in this case he got the original x86 unix executable to load and run on Linux using some elf hacking and writing some shim layers to account for some struct differences between old unix and modern Linux. Super cool nerdy stuff! Definitely worthy of being on Slashdot, at least the old community I used to know when Slashdot was at its prime.

    And this article is apropros also as just recently I wanted to try to run an elf binary from an old FreeBSD 6 system on mo

  • Re:

    "I guess it's mildly interesting to some, but this is pretty damn niche even for Slashdot."

    At least it's news for nerds if not stuff that matters.
    I prefer it to the political, 3d or crypto any day of the week.


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