Microsoft Excel’s 40-year-old rival suddenly revived-Information Technology

Longtime spreadsheet software Lotus 1-2-3 is returning and greeting users.

Lotus-1-2-3, a longstanding spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later IBM), is now back and ported to a new operating system.

According to the report of The Register, a Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast named Tavis Ormandy (also a Google Project Zero bug hunter), has successfully ported the program to the Linux operating system, which seems to be a miracle. work of reverse engineering. It’s important to note that this is not an emulator, but purely a 1990’s original Lotus for x86 Unix running natively on modern x86 Linux.

Lotus-1-2-3 – Old “killer” application

“There are a few things that are missing and need to be worked on, but it is 100% usable,” wrote Tavis in a blog post, detailing the work. Ormandy has also developed a completely new display driver for the program, which can run on multiple 80×25 windows.

The Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program has been “resurrected” on Linux.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the first “killer” application from the IBM PC, and was a huge success in the 1980s. It provided three preeminent capabilities at the time: spreadsheet computing, engine generation. databases and graphs in graphical form. Along with dBase and WordPerfect, it was once considered an essential application.

However, when Microsoft launched GUI-based products in the early 1990s, like Excel, Lotus-1-2-3 fell out of favor. Lotus reacted poorly to groundbreaking new products, and although acquired by IBM in 1995, never really returned to its heyday.

IBM then continued to sell Lotus services. But finally in June 2013, IBM announced to withdraw the Lotus brand, including Lotus 1-2-3 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9. 8.0 and Organizer V6.1.0. “Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these services after September 30, 2014,” the company said at the time, adding that no service extensions would be offered. And also no replacement program.