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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

The premise of the ad seems quite funny to me. It’s like they wanted to include the thing figuring out the patterns (I was a little impressed to see Q1, Q2, etc, but it would be nice to see it roll over to the next year as Q1 not Q5) but they somehow ended up with the excel-using businessman seeming to make up(?) some numbers for an important report and then project them linearly which doesn’t feel like the best message ever. Though they probably didn’t have enough time for someone to do a better job of modelling (if someone were doing it very quickly they probably couldn’t explain or show off drag and drop or toolbar buttons).

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Back then their competition was Lotus 1-2-3. What they were showing was that they had some basic automation for some common tasks (autofill, auto calculations, auto formatting) while everyone who was coming from Lotus, their target customer, knew how manual and tedious this kind of thing was to do. Plus the UI in Lotus was only slightly less convoluted than Emacs.

The part they should have shown was how you could have large, complex (for the time) spreadsheets and not run out of memory which was a significant advantage they had back then as DOS applications had serious memory constraints even with extended memory. A lot of heavy spreadsheet users switched to Excel for that feature alone.

> Plus the UI in Lotus was only slightly less convoluted than Emacs.

Not really. This is from 1992, by then 1-2-3 was in its second version for Windows.

I was referring to the DOS version which is what the majority of 1-2-3 users ever experienced. While the Windows version existed, it took far too long[1] to be released and was quite buggy. By the time Lotus had even a remotely viable Windows product, they were in 3rd place and had mostly bled out their users.

[1] Windows 3.0 came out in mid-1990 and 1-2-3 for Windows came out at the end of 1991. The options to run 1-2-3 for DOS under Windows until then were comically non-viable. When 1-2-3 for Windows came out, it was practically unusable for those who waited and no longer mattered for those who had already switched away.

WordStar had a similar fate.

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