Farewell Lotus 1-2-3

I worked in Lotus Development in Dublin between 1989 and 1993. When I joined the company, the most important product by far was Lotus 1-2-3. When I left it would be possible to argue that the most important product was Lotus Notes (in 1995 IBM acquired Lotus primarily to get its hands on Lotus Notes).

A few days ago (on 30th September to be exact) the end of an era came when IBM discontinued support for Lotus 1-2-3. See the image below for the announcement from the IBM website.

1-2-3 was released originally in 1983. So it was a supported software product for over 30 years. Not a bad record!

I worked in the "Advanced Support Group" when I was in Lotus and was there at the time we launched "Release 3.0". As I recall, there were two fairly serious issues with this release:

• It needed a lot of memory. This meant that it needed "extended" or "expanded" memory. These were new requirements for the market and caused lots of confusion.
• There was a problem at one stage in relation to specific calculations returning the wrong results. The passage of time has dimmed my recollection of this, but it may have been related to problems with the Pentium processor, or a floating-point coprocessor. But it certainly was alarming at the time.

The other problem with Release 3 was that it didn't have on-screen WYSIWYG capabilities (while the Release 2 product had the Allways add-in). This was fixed in Release 3.1 but by then there had been so much loss of momentum for 1-2-3 that it was difficult to recover.

In the end, of course, Excel went on to dominate the spreadsheet market and products like 1-2-3,  Borland's Quattro even Microsoft's own Multiplan joined VisiCalc in the software history books.