[neebz]

My father in the 80s was working at GE where he extensively used Lotus 1-2-3. He loved it so much that he bought a computer in 85 and used to use it at home as well. I always hated the boring blue and black screen.

We moved back to Pakistan in early 90s and we setup a small girls school. He used Lotus to keep track of all students, results, late fees, accounts etc. It required a lot of data entry but he absolutely loved that he could get required data in seconds. All the fellow owners of schools were super fascinated.

It took quite a while for him to shift to Excel later as he was super comfortable with Lotus. Pretty sure before his death deep down he still preferred Lotus over Excel

[nobleach]

In the late 90's I was doing a lot of IT work as a college student. One of my clients was an accounting firm that was still on a Novell Netware network. All of their apps were ancient terminal-based programs. Lotus 123 was one of the most important. I switched them over to a Linux server and NT workstations. The nightmare of getting captured LPT ports and print-servers configured to emulate Netware-style print queues was enough for me to lose it most days. Finally I asked, "why not just use MS Excel?" Then I watched one of the accountants. He completely flew around Lotus in a way that was inspiring. I imagine forcing him to learn a new tool would have introduced one heck of a hinderance to his daily grind. To this day, I have a serious affinity for CLI apps because of how well that team was able to zip through their work.

[hdpq]

this is so wholesome.