Reprinted From Byte Magazine, issue 12/1982, pp. 182-198.
1-2-3 is, above all else, a spreadsheet. Like most spreadsheets, it lets you enter either text, numbers, or formulas in a network of “cells” so that, by changing the content of certain cells, you can perform an involved set of calculations automatically. It’s safe to say that 1-2-3 has all the features you’ve ever seen on spreadsheets. You can copy ranges of cells, insert and delete rows and columns, change the output format of a range of cells or the width of a column of cells, and do numerous other functions.
The size of the spreadsheet is 2048 rows of 256 columns. Lotus claims that 1-2-3 will handle up to 640K bytes of memory. You can’t fill the entire spreadsheet with that, but it’s probably considerably more than enough for most applications.
[snip]
1-2-3 will be available for the IBM Personal Computer sometime next month; it will eventually be available for other 8086- and 8088-based microcomputers, although Lotus has announced no definite plans or machines. Lotus has also fixed the price of 1-2-3 at $495, which makes it a tremendous buy for the money. Staff members point out that 1-2-3 improves on the Visicorp trilogy of Visicalc, Visiplot, and Visidex (which together sell for a total of $700 in their IBM PC versions) in both price and capabilities.
I bought (for my employer) at least one if not two copies of 1-2-3 at that retail price; hard to believe now, isn't it?
Posted by Linkmeister at August 8, 2009 10:44 AM | TrackBack Yeow! It's been a while since I heard 1-2-3.
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I think I still have the install disks for Lotus 1-2-3 around somewhere, not to mention the documentation. (I have to clean this place up some time.) At that date, would've been 5 1/4" floppies. I'm pretty sure I recall running 1-2-3 on my Compaq luggable.
Aren't old things fun? I think my cell phone has more memory than that Compaq did.
Posted by: hedera at August 9, 2009 06:46 PMIn 1982, I bought an Apple II+ and equipped it with 2 floppy disk drives and a dot-matrix printer (can't recall the brand at this minute). It came with 48K of memory, so I splurged and added 16K more - a whole 64k of memory! I was in seventh heaven!! LOL
After all, it was way better than the computer my son borrowed in 1980 from someone he knew with a store near Chaminade. That was an Ohio Scientific and it used a tape drive to load. If I remember, it had 4k of memory and all it did was play Pong!!
Those were the days!!
Posted by: Illanoy Gal at August 10, 2009 11:08 AM