He had kept tape backups from old BBS systems, and was able to recover a warez copy of the SDK – unbelievable! It actually worked, I was able to build a few sample plugins! LPL Compiler Check out his website, he still has a catalogue of NFOs and a telnet BBS online if you want to see some rad ANSI art! It’s so frustating, I can see screenshots of the debugger, compiler output and sample add-ins - but just can’t do anything with it without the SDK! Lotus Toolkit Guide Progress Scenelist NFOįast forward a year or two, and I found someone who used to be a sysop in the ’90s BBS scene. I like the cover on this one, very serious business. There were also two third-party books written about LPL, I managed to track them down from old libraries. I emailed a few developers who worked on some to see if they had any old backups, the answer was always the same – 1-2-3 was the biggest name in software, nobody thought it was going anywhere, so why would they keep backups? There were lots of commercial plugins available in the heyday, some were really impressive. I can’t imagine many people have a copy just lying around. This is not really surprising, this was a niche product and Lotus didn’t just give the SDK away – they charged $395 for it. The problem is add-ins had to be written in a special language called LPL, and unfortunately the compiler and SDK have been lost. 1-2-3 was designed to be extensible with plugins (or “add-ins”) – in theory you could add support for modern spreadsheet functions or integrate with Google Finance or something! Getting that driver working was quite an adventure, but there is still one piece of the puzzle missing: add-ins.
I had to reverse engineer the driver api to make that happen, but it works beautifully. I really like Lotus 1-2-3, I even maintain a driver to make sure it works well on modern systems. If you want to hear how a proprietary application could be ported to new operating systems 30 years after release, read on. I’ll cut to the chase through a combination of unlikely discoveries, crazy hacks and the 90s BBS warez scene I’ve been able to port Lotus 1-2-3 natively to Linux – an operating system that literally didn’t exist when 1-2-3 was released! 1 There have been some major developments in the last few weeks, and I guess that’s pretty unusual for 30 year old abandonware. It really is an exciting time though – that part isn’t a joke!
It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me! 😆 Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux
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