Probably in the days before nicely defined interfaces and device
drivers. Talking to the LPT1 port a byte at a time is no fun.
Scary about the accounting spreadsheets. Probably no one really knew
what they really did nor were they able to verify the output. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
Moose wrote:
> Ken Norton wrote:
>>> Jonathan is Jonathan Sachs of Lotus 1-2-3 fame. One of the original PC DOS
>>> and Winders programmers. A Mac version of PWP would be pretty surprising.
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sachs>
>> I met Mr. Sachs years ago at a conference in Chicago. His ability to create
>> capabilities where none exist is mindboggling. A programming genius.
>>
>
> If I ever meet him, my question will be what Lotus was doing in the time
> between selecting Print and something coming out of the printer.
>
> Lotus was a really useful program, and quite responsive while developing
> and working with spreadsheets. Move around, enter formulas, change a
> value that cascaded through the sheets, read data in, and so on, and it
> did the job quickly, or at least you could see that it was working. Tell
> it to print and there was this loooooong pause while nothing noticeable
> happened at all. No disk activity, no printer activity, nothing. I guess
> even if it had a window lying about print preparation process progress
> it would have been better.
>
> At this time in my life, I would just sit quietly, like a
> mini-meditation. Back then, it drove me crazy, especially when up
> against the inevitable, usually artificial, deadlines.
>
> I switched to Quattro when it came out. I thought it was better overall
> than Lotus - and - it started printing promptly. Eventually had to go
> with Excel to get along with accounting. Some of their planning
> spreadsheets were like vast newly discovered, unexplored continents.
> There was a danger of getting lost in them and never coming out alive.
>
> Moose
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