The old Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for UNIX has been found and ported to Linux. This is incredible. Now fans of this old application can run it on a modern Linux distribution. Linux did not even exist when Lotus 1-2-3 was available on the venerable UNIX operating system, but it was ported to Linux and now it is alive again. This is amazing. Seeing an old office application like this running on a modern distribution. One problem mentioned on the website is that compiling C code into an object file will result in a working file for a UNIX system, but it will not work on Linux as the struct arrays are a different size, but the hacker who did this wrote a wrapper to translate this and this is how he got this to work. Pretty simple huh? But it works a treat to get such an old application running on Linux. Apparently, there is an internal symbol named lic_init() that looks for a valid license. If this is bypassed you do not need a 30-year-old license key to run this application in 2022. The file containing the information is named LICENSE.000. This contains an expiry date, username and systemname.
If this all matches then the program will run, but bypassing this is OK I guess after 30 years. Read more on the website: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html#incompatible-functions. There is a comprehensive description of the porting process and a Github link for the source code. Give this a try and see how you go with this. It would be a fun little program to play around with and even use. Software 30 years ago was very good, just limited by the technology of the time. But it was not as bloated as software is these days. Nowadays the programmers add more and more code to the application and it just gets bigger and bigger and requires more memory than before. Such is progress I guess, but at what cost? We need slimmer code to be written. Just because we have machines with 16 GiB of RAM does not mean we use all of it at once. There needs to be a yardstick for measuring performance and this must force coders to write more optimised code in the future.
Github link: https://github.com/taviso/123elf.
Download this and have a go yourself.