{"slug": "lotus-1-2-3", "name": "Lotus 1-2-3", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 7, "warners": 0, "score": 4.228, "rising": -1.31, "first": "2025-12-09", "latest": "2026-09-22", "why": "", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 2, "compare": 1, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/taviso/123elf", "official_url": "https://github.com/taviso/123elf", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Lotus 1-2-3"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 784921059, "item_id": 49057566, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057566", "by": "adrian_b", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3", "excerpt": "In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years. It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boi", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheet", "switched_from": "", "story": "No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s"}, {"id": 757138432, "item_id": 47321152, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321152", "by": "zkmon", "date": "2026-03-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot. Absolutely loved it.", "excerpt": "I used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot. Absolutely loved it. Used to feed the data to \"Freelance\" program to create charts. That charts program used to be a target for all sorts of viruses, and whenever I launch it, it used to display a random animal dancing around (virus). Good old days:)", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}, {"id": 757130400, "item_id": 47320650, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320650", "by": "billygoat", "date": "2026-03-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But 1-2-3 was clearly better.", "excerpt": "woohoo, great post, brings back memories. My first internship when I was 19 and still in college (well, failing out at that point but that's another story...) was at a small consulting company where every desk had a 286 clone running MS-DOS 3.3. We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and Sup", "context": "intern at a small consulting company in the 1980s", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}, {"id": 757117744, "item_id": 47319859, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319859", "by": "smackeyacky", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "1-2-3 was damn cool though", "excerpt": "When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter ", "context": "sold PCs early in career", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "billygoat", "context": "intern at a small consulting company in the 1980s", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320650", "date": "2026-03-10"}, {"by": "smackeyacky", "context": "sold PCs early in career", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319859", "date": "2026-03-09"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["spreadsheets", "dos spreadsheet", "spreadsheet", "terminal spreadsheet"], "compared": [{"slug": "lotus-notes", "name": "Lotus Notes", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 757133312, "item_id": 47320832, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320832", "by": "gadders", "date": "2026-03-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used to work for Lotus, supporting 1-2-3.", "excerpt": "I used to work for Lotus, supporting 1-2-3. Mucking around with autoexec.bat, config.sys, emm386 etc to get 1-2-3 to load was fun. Lots of TSRs using up memory. The amount of times I had to tell people to create a \"clean config\" by commenting out most of autoexec.bat... We also had to post people floppy disks with the correct printer driver on. No downloads in those days. \"What would a piece of software have to do to", "context": "former Lotus support employee", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279633", "title": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785783", "title": "NEC V20 CPU: A bit of pep for an XT", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056424", "title": "No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47636456", "title": "Sheets Spreadsheets in Your Terminal", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208409", "title": "The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 3}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"compare": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 796795281, "item_id": 49799705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49799705", "by": "lproven", "date": "2026-09-22", "stance": "compare", "quote": "you could just stay on 1-2-3 r2 which worked fine on everything", "excerpt": "It worked well. I used a few V20 and V30 PCs. One very nice little win: If you had an NEC chip, then Windows 3.0 ran in colour VGA mode. If you had an Intel chip, it wouldn't. The VGA device driver was 286 code and the assumption was that VGA chips were only in 286 PCs. (IBM's own 8086 and later very-low-end 80286 PS/2 machines, both called the Model 30, did not have VGA which was only in Microchannel machines; they ", "context": "", "use_case": "DOS spreadsheet", "switched_from": "", "story": "NEC V20 CPU: A bit of pep for an XT"}, {"id": 784921059, "item_id": 49057566, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057566", "by": "adrian_b", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3", "excerpt": "In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years. It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boi", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheet", "switched_from": "", "story": "No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s"}, {"id": 762723024, "item_id": 47670189, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47670189", "by": "etc-hosts", "date": "2026-04-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use Lotus 1-2-3 in a Terminal", "excerpt": "I use Lotus 1-2-3 in a Terminal https://github.com/taviso/123elf", "context": "", "use_case": "terminal spreadsheet", "switched_from": "", "story": "Sheets Spreadsheets in Your Terminal"}, {"id": 757138432, "item_id": 47321152, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321152", "by": "zkmon", "date": "2026-03-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot. Absolutely loved it.", "excerpt": "I used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot. Absolutely loved it. Used to feed the data to \"Freelance\" program to create charts. That charts program used to be a target for all sorts of viruses, and whenever I launch it, it used to display a random animal dancing around (virus). Good old days:)", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}, {"id": 757130400, "item_id": 47320650, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320650", "by": "billygoat", "date": "2026-03-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But 1-2-3 was clearly better.", "excerpt": "woohoo, great post, brings back memories. My first internship when I was 19 and still in college (well, failing out at that point but that's another story...) was at a small consulting company where every desk had a 286 clone running MS-DOS 3.3. We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and Sup", "context": "intern at a small consulting company in the 1980s", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}, {"id": 757117744, "item_id": 47319859, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319859", "by": "smackeyacky", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "1-2-3 was damn cool though", "excerpt": "When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter ", "context": "sold PCs early in career", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}, {"id": 739356592, "item_id": 46209787, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209787", "by": "ForOldHack", "date": "2025-12-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used it both for Lotus 1-2-3 and Turbo Pascal-87.", "excerpt": "This is cool, but the renormalization and (Programmable and bidirectional) barrel shifter are of much more interest. I had a 10Mhz XT, and ran a 8087-8 at a bit higher clock rate. I used it both for Lotus 1-2-3 and Turbo Pascal-87. It made Turbo Pascal significantly faster.", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered"}]}