Our younger readers are probably wondering what Lotus 1-2-3 is. In essence, it's "Excel before Excel," an old program that revolutionized spreadsheet creation in the early '80s. And there's the catch: if we say "Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux," we're talking about an application for an operating system that didn't exist yet. So how is that possible? The answer and the corresponding port are the work of Tavis Ormandy, whom we know better from Google's Project Zero...
Lotus 1-2-3 hit store shelves on January 26, 1983. Technically it wasn't the first application of its kind (that honor goes to VisiCalc), but it presented itself as a much more complete solution, combining spreadsheets, databases, and graphics (hence the 1-2-3). Lotus 1-2-3 thus became the first killer app for the IBM PC, was a key piece of software in the development of compatible computers, and established itself as the de facto standard for nearly a decade.
In the early '90s, Windows's surge in popularity let Excel devour everything in its path, and Lotus 1-2-3 eventually got displaced. 32 years later, Lotus 1-2-3 is back in the news, but not the way we imagine. Security researcher Tavis Ormandy is such a fan of Lotus 1-2-3 that he created a driver to ensure compatibility in DOSEMU. However, add-in support always remained pending due to the lack of the compiler and SDK (Lotus asked $395 for a copy at the time). Fortunately, things recently changed for Tavis. What did he find? Much more than he expected.
Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux, and the warez to the rescue
After consulting old Lotus 1-2-3 developers looking for a lost backup, Tavis reached SCiZE’s Classic Warez Collection, with a superbackup full of forgotten programs and games. Inside that backup he found a warez copy of the Lotus 1-2-3 SDK, but that's not all: he also located a special version of Lotus 1-2-3 for UNIX, a single build compatible with System V that saw the light in 1990.
The warez was stored in TD0 images belonging to the old TeleDisk. Tavis used SAMdisk (no relation to the manufacturer) to convert the images to RAW, and load a copy into the Internet Archive. This edition of Lotus 1-2-3 was basically a DOS port, but Tavis ran into several difficulties during the conversion to Linux, including incompatible functions and system calls.
With much effort, Tavis succeeded, and classic Lotus 1-2-3 now has a native version for Linux. On his blog, he admits that the DOS version under an emulator looks much better, but it's a detail that can be fixed in the future, and he still needs to reactivate resources like graphics and print support. Interested? Link to GitHub below.
Official site: Click here
Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux on GitHub: Click here
