[HN Gopher] Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution
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Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution
Author : diffuse_l
Score : 277 points
Date : 2021-03-02 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lock.cmpxchg8b.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lock.cmpxchg8b.com)
| schnable wrote:
| Amazing story.
|
| Can't believe the Lotus FTP site is still live. Wonder where that
| thing is running and if anyone actually knows it still is.
|
| > I was able to find the drivers on an old ftp site.
|
| Wonder what FTP site this is and how he found it?
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Can't believe the Lotus FTP site is still live. Wonder where
| that thing is running"_
|
| Had me curious as well. $ host
| ftp.support.lotus.com ftp.support.lotus.com is an alias
| for service.boulder.ibm.com. service.boulder.ibm.com has
| address 170.225.15.26
|
| It's running WUFTPD 2.6.3, which is abandonware as far as I can
| tell. Though no open vulnerabilities listed.
| bombcar wrote:
| Nobody at IBM will ever want to be the person to suggest
| decommissioning a server that might make a paying customer
| yell at their manager. Expect it to continue forever.
| ArchOversight wrote:
| That system has probably been migrated a hundred times, and
| will continue to be!
| brassattax wrote:
| If only Google were like IBM we'd still have Reader.
| spockz wrote:
| This is what metrics are for right? See that nobody is
| using it, shut it down. Which probably won't happen anymore
| with all the HN traffic it receives now.
| bombcar wrote:
| Metrics are hard to justify and use on a "once every five
| years" type of access. Much simpler to throw the machine
| you don't know what it does into a VM and leave it alone.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| It's linked in the post: ftp://ftp.support.lotus.com/pub/
|
| The Internet Archive has a copy too:
| https://archive.org/details/2008-12-23_ftp.support.lotus.com
| schnable wrote:
| He mentioned another one as well.
| anthk wrote:
| On the DOS post on Lotus from Taviso, maybe he would like Groff +
| Mom + a Makefile entr watching for the file changes (and running
| make) with MuPDF refreshing the content automatically.
|
| Far lighter than LaTeX, and almost as user-friendly as the old
| word processors.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| It takes a certain kind of puzzle curiosity to do this sort of
| thing. I find I would have re-written Lotus 1-2-3 from scratch
| rather than do all this but that is just another way of spending
| one's "cleverness beans" as they used to say.
|
| People with this level of curiosity and puzzle affinity make
| great security researchers/staff. In their own way older binaries
| are all puzzle boxes that are holding some number of exploitable
| vulnerabilities to make them do things that their original
| developer either didn't intend or didn't foresee. Finding them
| gives a dopamine hit.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Hehe, this is Tavis (from Project Zero), so he might know a bit
| about security.
|
| Dopamine hits are probably a large determining factor of what
| kind of programmer you are. Making something from scratch has a
| longer glow, and a fulfilling crescendo, but nothing compares
| with the joy of finding the right thing to whisper to a machine
| to get it to do something it was never meant to. Whether it be
| displaying DOS interfaces in wide screen or dumping its memory.
| The pain of looking for the right combination only makes
| finding it sweeter.
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me of the HP 200LX that came with full version of Lotus
| 1-2-3 v2.4. Quite a powerful computer to run off of two AA
| batteries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX
|
| I still feel there's things it could do that I can't do with my
| iPhone; and spreadsheets is one of them. (Yes you can get Excel
| on an iPhone, the interface sucks).
| raldi wrote:
| I had one of these in college! I hooked it up to a serial port
| and set up Linux to use it as a login terminal, so I could do
| email in Pine while my girlfriend worked on homework with the
| actual keyboard/mouse/monitor.
|
| It didn't just have Lotus; it had a dedicated Lotus _key._
| lykr0n wrote:
| Stuff like this is so cool, and also highlights the importance of
| archiving the internet.
|
| I've never used Lotus 1-2-3, but this makes me want to try and
| get it running to try out older software that is brutally
| efficient.
| technofiend wrote:
| Lotus 123's slash commands were extremely handy. To the point
| where Microsoft was forced to copy them when Excel first came
| out to ease transition of users. There's a ton of older
| references on the web on how to use them. See
| https://www.isric.org/sites/default/files/isric_report_1990_...
| for a reproduction of 123's main menus. The sequences become
| muscle memory really fast.
| brassattax wrote:
| Huh. First time I've ever seen "@" referred to as the
| "monkeytail sign" (pg 15)
| homarp wrote:
| very interesting software archeology!
| guerrilla wrote:
| Really it does feel like archeology. When does this person get
| admitted to the department? :)
| homarp wrote:
| his day job is Project Zero at google so it's a bit like
| reverse Indiana Jones: hunting for "treasure" at work,
| archeology as a hobby...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This is freaking awesome!
|
| I mostly stick to GUI era software, and find Word 97 to be
| amazing for writing.
|
| I run it inside a VM rather than using Wine.
| unixhero wrote:
| Word97 has actually run perfectly in Wine since 1998-1999. I
| tested it back then and it worked perfectly.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| That's good to know. It just feels more "at home" inside a VM
| I already use for accessibility and compatibility testing
| anyway (IE3+ for my sites), and it starts up faster than with
| Wine for me.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| This is waaaay off topic, but you've piqued my interest --
| what on earth are you still testing with IE3 for?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Don't use any site he made... Anything compatible with
| IE3 is incompatible with modern privacy expectations
| (doesn't support any vaguely secure variant of HTTPS, and
| any server which supports old variants can't be protected
| against downgrade attacks, and therefore cannot protect
| users privacy)
| moonbug wrote:
| bro, it's ok not to have Https on all the things.
| bawolff wrote:
| You can't downgrade a modern browser to ssl 3 (the most
| recent version supported by IE3) because modern browsers
| dont support sslv3 (prior to dropping support there were
| also some fixes for downgrade attacks).
|
| Dont get me wrong, supporting sslv3 is still a terrible
| idea.
|
| It would be interesting to know though what the most
| secure possible setup is for servers supporting ie3, both
| when a modern browser connects and when connecting to
| ie3, and what the security properties are. I would guess
| that its at least secure against passive monitoring (e.g.
| a mass survelience situation), which is a pretty low bar,
| but also the bar a lot of people care about.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Is what you say still true if you also want to support
| IE4, 5, 6, 7, etc? You'd want functionality for all the
| browsers, and strong privacy for the latest versions of
| browsers.
|
| I assume if you're supporting ie3 you also want to
| support every newer version.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I would guess that its at least secure against passive
| monitoring
|
| It isn't. IE3 used 40-bit encryption by default, which is
| trivially brute-forceable with modern hardware. Some
| versions supported 128-bit ciphers, but only through an
| unusual upgrade process [1] which depended upon "Global
| Server ID" SSL certificates with special extensions which
| are no longer issued.
|
| [1]: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/machine/anxiety-
| closet/apache...
|
| Even if it weren't for that, it's no longer possible to
| issue a certificate that would be recognized by IE3. All
| newly issued SSL certificates are required to be signed
| with SHA256, which wasn't even published until 2001. (The
| final release of IE3 was in 1997.)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I believe in any browser, and it,s a capable, usable,
| beautiful browser.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Do you test on IE for Mac too, not every browser['s
| rendering] is beautiful to me!
|
| Tbh though, back in the day, I used to love jumping
| through all the hoops to get the idiot cousins in the
| browsing world rendering a webpage well.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| IE3 gave me a bit of a challenge because it likes cookies
| to only be set a certain way, JUST SO.
|
| However, the most adjustment was probably for Mosaic, who
| treats ">", not "-->" as HTML comment closing, so my
| JavaScript can't have > characters. For if statements, I
| flip them, and anytime I need a > character, I get it
| from the char value. (Almost all my JS is baked into the
| HTML by the templating engine, because some browsers
| don't like/support external includes.)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I don't have an extensive Mac IE testing stable yet, but
| I have tested in IE5 Mac, which has its own rendering
| engine called Tasman.
|
| However, with every browser I add support for it becomes
| more and more likely that another one I try will also
| work, especially if it came later. Netscape 2.0 works, so
| that covers a good range.
|
| Pre-Mosaic, I have not done much testing yet, in part
| because it's difficult to find them.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Word 2003 is mostly the same (last version without ribbon) and
| has an update available to let it read/write OOXML docs.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| You should try to find SCO Professional.. It was a 1-2-3 clone
| for UNIX/Xenix that I think used curses or at least termcap. It
| worked quite well in an SCO Xenix-based office I maintained in
| the early 90s.
|
| So this was a single 386 machine with a large card that supported
| multiple hercules graphics card eqivalents as daughter boards.
| Terminals included a keyboard and monitor connected to this card
| over RS-485. A single 386 supported four users this way.
|
| Here is an ad for it:
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=LVCsAZClkfUC&pg=PT453&lpg=...
|
| It ran SCO Professional, Real World Accounting and a custom
| database. There was no TCP/IP.
|
| This system replaced the previous Radio Shack model 16-based
| system. That one ran RM/COS and had several serial port
| terminals.
| cseleborg wrote:
| You had me at 'a boxed copy of the last DOS version released,
| version 4!'
| antonzabirko wrote:
| Wow what an amazing read!
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| I'm obsessed with that Siemens HighPrint 7400 manual cover.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I want her to tie me up and do bad things to me while berating
| me in a German accent
| unixhero wrote:
| To be fair... HELL YEAH
| azinman2 wrote:
| When I was a kid, looking at all the photos in the Macintosh
| manual of the very 80s office setups made for some serious
| techno-lust material. It's funny to look back at it all now,
| but it was often a combination of hardware that'd cost
| something pike $20k or more in 2021 dollars!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Fascinating, I was a kid but just old enough to remember trying
| out this kind of DOS software and reading Norton's book as well.
|
| However, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a "modern"
| terminal floss office suite. There are a number of projects, but
| they are scattered:
|
| https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/115548
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _However, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a
| "modern" terminal floss office suite._
|
| Lotus is not is not open source. You would need to get IBM to
| release it as open source, which of course means they would
| have to have the code stored somewhere. While we're at it we
| can get microsoft to release the dos versions of works and
| visual basic, and whoever owns wordperfect to release that.
| sneak wrote:
| This is awesome.
|
| Could a js transpilation of a dos emulator be used to get this to
| run well in a browser? It would be cool to have a text mode
| spreadsheet that works in a browser and could be self hosted.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| This is beautiful, I love it. So much passion, grit, and skill!
| userbinator wrote:
| This reminds me I should try to make a bit more progress with
| trying to write an RDP display driver for Win9x... one of those
| things I thought of one day but never really got around to doing.
| (I'm sure there are existing solutions, but writing my own is
| half the fun --- and I've already written a generic VESA
| framebuffer.)
|
| I like stuff like this in the same ways as car modding ---
| teaching an old dog new tricks.
| rasz wrote:
| >I've already written a generic VESA framebuffer
|
| you mean like this https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm ?
| retiredalien wrote:
| This reminds of the
| dwiel wrote:
| A bit off topic, but what I've wanted forever and never found is
| a spreadsheet that deals in units natively. So if one cell is in
| Newtons and I divide it by a cell that is in m/s^2 I want the
| resulting cell to be in grams. Units should propagate through the
| sheet automatically. Unit prefixes can either be automatic (km,
| m, mm, um, etc) or fixed as you would with a format setting.
|
| Google calculator is the closest thing I've seen to this, but it
| isnt in spreadsheet form.
|
| Anyone know of a system that provides this functionality?
| moonbug wrote:
| you can do that in mathematica, I think.
| mceoin wrote:
| Is this for business or personal use? (We're building a
| spreadsheet product @ Sourcetable.)
| akx wrote:
| There's always Frink. https://frinklang.org/
| jsmith99 wrote:
| R also has a units package. It's mostly used by geospatial
| libraries.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Or f# https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Interestingly, it seems there's a Sheets add-on which provides
| at least some of what you want-- unfortunately not with cell
| metadata, but rather using pairs of adjacent cells for the
| quantity and units:
|
| https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/legendsheet/210...
|
| The dev does a demo here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Nvw2q889Q
| LanceH wrote:
| 1-2-3 would allow you to plot a function on your graphs.
| Something that I haven't seen since. The solution now is to
| build a range and values, but that just adds one extra column
| of data to massage versus having a reference line covering the
| domain and range of that particular graph.
| pjettter wrote:
| Interesting! I do this on paper a lot because that's how I
| learned in college. Thinking of it. It's composing converters.
| That should be fairly easy to automate!
| leblancfg wrote:
| Never tried it, but Wolfram has a Mathematica plug-in for
| Excel.
|
| https://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/
| scrumper wrote:
| I remember Mathematica being a bit weak with units actually.
| Natively there's no support, you have to rely on add-on
| packages and I didn't have much success with the popular one.
| But my experience is from version 8 (a while ago) so it may
| have improved since.
| friend-monoid wrote:
| Mathematica 9 and above has had significant improvements in
| its unit support. I've found it to be really good.
| mhh__ wrote:
| This is one of the first uses C++ templates had way back in the
| early 90s IIRC.
| kroltan wrote:
| Not a spreadsheet, no, (it is more of a freeform worksheet) but
| SMath Studio is a breeze to work on with units.
|
| It has complete support for units of measurement and comes with
| most built-in. It can also decompose derived units into simpler
| forms if it finds a match.
|
| It is free but not open-source.
| schoen wrote:
| GNU units does this, but is definitely not a spreadsheet or
| anything like a spreadsheet. It might be possible for a
| spreadsheet to arrange to call it as a back-end, though.
| You have: 100 N / (50 m/s^2) You want:
| Definition: 2 kg
| codesnik wrote:
| spreadsheets barely have distinction between strings and
| numbers. Units would be another level! I hope that at some
| point something like a strongly typed jupyter notebook tailored
| specifically for table inputs would arise and replace some
| current usages of spreadsheets in office/consumer space.
| andylynch wrote:
| Haven't tried it yet since not on Office 365 but there's a
| very interesting custom data types feature emerged in Excel
| just a few months ago https://sfmagazine.com/post-
| entry/december-2020-excel-add-yo...
| sir_nop wrote:
| Or a programming language? Or a Python module?
| JNRowe wrote:
| Beyond simply joining in on the F# love... If you're using
| Python anyway, then Pint1 makes unit handling really easy.
|
| 1 https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorial.html
| pletnes wrote:
| In python there's the pint module, which works with pandas
| dataframes, which can read/write excel sheets. So yeah,
| maybe. Why do anything in excel, except for data entry?
| paulclinger wrote:
| Somebody already referenced F# elsewhere in the thread:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-
| refe.... It will apply unit of measure checks as part of
| their static type checking.
| vq wrote:
| The only one I know of is org-mode[0]. It defers calculations
| to calc-mode which handles units.
|
| [0]: https://orgmode.org
| tyingq wrote:
| There's this: http://www.dimensionengine.com/excel/DEAddIn/
|
| Their description sounds a lot like yours.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Yes this would have been so useful in my lab courses at
| university. Bonus points if cells could have errors and it
| could do error propagation.
|
| I started working on this back then but got frustrated trying
| to make a grid control and gave up :-)
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