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 for dead rather than look at Word.

Lotus users were just as fanatical. It’s probably lost to the mists of time but Lotus could be had for Sun workstations and some users who hit the limit of MS-DOS with Lotus switched to that. It was nuts the things people built with that: prop trading in Lotus on a Sun? Why not.

I’d like to see this blogger do Lotus Notes but I suspect unless you’d actually seen the crazy that Notes developers went to you wouldn’t really understand why it elicited audible groans from pre sales staff when they heard the client was a big Notes user but “was running into problems”.

1-2-3 was damn cool though, Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.

This is the best blog post I’ve read in the past few years.

I wish I had the tenacity to do more than read 1/3 of it and skim the rest. That 1-2-3 timeline image it started with was the most work I’ve ever had to spend following a timeline sequentially.

The memories. Amazing.

LLMs- write like this. WRITE LIKE THIS!

Yes, used it on MS-DOS 3.3, until getting hold of Works for MS-DOS.

Such an awesome blog.