There always was one big difference between Lotus and Excel - Lotus didn't screw your keyboard macros when a new version came in! I am still using data entry macros in some spreadsheet jobs that I wrote in 1987, and I'm up to Smartsuite 97.
On the other hand, an Excel job I did for a client last year fell in a heap when I was trying to add buttons and other objects to it - there is an undocumented upper limit to the number of objects a workbook can contain! I think too that Lotus was derivative rather than a rip-off. Mitch Kapoor said at a Lotus users conference in 1984, that the first versions (up to 2.1 IIRC) were written in Assembler, but they then rewrote the whole thing in C. The sad thing is that some of the programs written for Windows 3.1 and earlier simply won't run in later versions - I tried Pagemaker 3 the other day, and it won't even install! I wanted to test a lean mean, 1980's era program on today's fast CPU, big memory systems; the only instance I have currently is a dBASE application I wrote in 1989 or thereabouts which absolutely scorches on a Pentium III 450 mHz with 512 mB. John Coyle Brisbane, Australia ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 1:32 PM Subject: Re: OT: Mac Blat <SNIP> > > >Excel is a rip-off of Lotus > > There is no doubt of that, there is very little difference between the two. Anyone familiar with Lotus (Dos Version) can see that all Excel added was a Windows interface -- otherwise they are almost identical. (Except VBA replaced Lotus' macros, but that is really only apparent on a "programming" level -- and not that big a change.) > > > > > Which was a rip-off of SuperCalc which was a rip-off of Visicalc. > > I think Lotus borrowed more from VisiCalc, myself. However, a great deal of Lotus was innovative as well, it really carried spreadsheets to a new and higher level. > > >
