- #WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 HOW TO#
- #WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 PORTABLE#
- #WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 SOFTWARE#
- #WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 DOWNLOAD#
- #WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 WINDOWS#
To build a sandbox you pretty much doom yourself to running at 1/10th the speed of the underlying platform, and you doom yourself to never supporting any of the cool features that show up on one of the platforms but not the others. But sandboxes are penalty boxes they’re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead. You can follow the p-code/Java model and build a little sandbox on top of the underlying system. What’s going to happen? Well, you can try begging Microsoft and Firefox to be more compatible. Startup web browsers don’t stand a chance. There is simply no alternative but to test exhaustively on Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari, and Opera, and guess what? I don’t have time to test on Opera. Writing applications that work in all different browsers is a friggin’ nightmare. Right now the big hole in the portability story is - tada! - client-side JavaScript, and especially the DOM in web browsers.
#WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 PORTABLE#
And it did a fine job, but wasn’t really 100% portable, so we got Java, which was even more portable than C. The C programming language was invented with the explicit goal of making it easy to port applications from one instruction set to another. The developers who ignored performance and blasted ahead adding cool features to their applications will, in the long run, have better applications. The developers who put a lot of effort into optimizing things and making them tight and fast will wake up to discover that effort was, more or less, wasted, or, at the very least, you could say that it “conferred no long term competitive advantage,” if you’re the kind of person who talks like an economist.
#WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 HOW TO#
People are figuring out how to precompile JavaScript. Either way, you really have to squeeze to get complex AJAX apps to perform well.
#WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 DOWNLOAD#
This time, it’s not the RAM or CPU cycles that are scarce: it’s the download bandwidth and the compile time.
#WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 SOFTWARE#
And since that’s the direction almost all software development is moving, that’s a big deal.Ī lot of today’s AJAX applications have a meg or more of client side code. So, we don’t care about performance or optimization much anymore.Įxcept in one place: JavaScript running on browsers in AJAX applications. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Within a couple of years, the 80386SX came out, and anybody who could afford a $1500 clone could run Excel.Īs a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice.
#WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 WINDOWS#
Microsoft first shipped Excel for Windows when 80386s were too expensive to buy, but they were patient.
In the late 90s a couple of companies, including Microsoft and Apple, noticed (just a little bit sooner than anyone else) that Moore’s Law meant that they shouldn’t think too hard about performance and memory usage… just build cool stuff, and wait for the hardware to catch up. There just wasn’t that much memory and there just weren’t that many CPU cycles. Limited-memory, limited-CPU environmentsįrom the beginning of time until about, say, 1989, programmers were extremely concerned with efficiency. Humor me for a minute, because history is repeating itself, in three different ways, and the smart strategy is to bet on the same results.
“Who gives a fart about some old character mode software?”
And Symphony had an inadequate spreadsheet, an inadequate word processor, and some other inadequate bits. By the time 123 3.0 was shipping, everybody had 80386s with 2M or 4M of RAM. In the case of Symphony, they just chopped features left and right. They spent 18 months cramming 1-2-3 for DOS into 640K, and eventually, after a lot of wasted time, had to give up the 3D feature to get it to fit. IBM was starting to ship a few computers with 80286 chips, which could address more memory, but Lotus didn’t think there was a big enough market for software that needed a $10,000 computer to run. That became 1-2-3 version 3.0.īoth ideas ran head-first into a serious problem: the old DOS 640K memory limitation. Another idea which seemed obvious was to make a 3-D spreadsheet. There were two obvious ideas: first, they could add more features. In the late 80s, Lotus was trying very hard to figure out what to do next with their flagship spreadsheet and graphics product, Lotus 1-2-3.
But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony.