- #WHAT HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 PC#
- #WHAT HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 DOWNLOAD#
- #WHAT HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 WINDOWS#
Next week we'll look back at the history of Agenda, both within the company and in the marketplace. Also, the development team's initial positioning statement provides background on the program's theoretical underpinnings.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 DOWNLOAD#
If you are going to download the Agenda (/pim/agendadl.htm), you'll have to reformat your floppy disks to 720K-bytes, which suggests how cumbersome the procedure is. With Agenda, you input your ideas while they're fresh, and then work with the program to figure out where they belong in your structure-in-progress. Only after the structure is set can you enter data. In relational database-management programs such as Access and Paradox, you initially build a structure for your data. In other words, Agenda manages its database of information in the opposite way of traditional databases. By placing specific items into multiple categories, any view you choose will reveal all relevant items. This may seem like a lot of redundancy, but it's an efficient way of storing and deploying information. And because you used the word "today," Agenda will file the item by date, too. For example, if you have categories called "Mary," "Sally," and "Sales" and you have a specific piece of information that reads "Tell Mary that Sally needs sales reports today," the item will automatically show up into those three categories. Any words in a specific piece of information that are also names of categories are automatically filed into that category as well as any others you want to place it in. Then you can assign your specific pieces of information to more than one category. Without manipulating your data structure, Agenda lets you view your data organized by category, specific piece of information, date and priority. These specific pieces of information can also be further divided into categories ("Calls," "Memos," "Ideas," etc.). "Memorize "Hamlet"," etc.), one for the date and one for priority. And basic tasks may have been the key to the program's unstated goal: to manipulate ideas as efficiently as Lotus 1-2-3 managed numbers.Ī typical Agenda screen is divided into three columns: one in which you enter the specific piece of information ("Call Mom," "Sell Yahoo stock," Its user interface wasn't fundamentally different from Lotus 1-2-3, the previous program imagined by Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapok, at far as basic tasks were concerned. But back then what was different about Agenda was not how it looked so much as what it did, or sought to do.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 WINDOWS#
Today, its blue and gray text screens and tabbed-menu structure differentiate it from Windows programs. Lotus Agenda is just as unusual today as it was in 1988. If you are going to download (/pim/agendadl.htm) the program, you'll have to reformat your floppy disks to 720K-bytes, which suggests how cumbersome the procedure is. Stay tuned for our next Special Report installment which will examine how Agenda was developed, why it was cancelled and what many think it might be the ideal program for 1998.Ĭhances are you don't use Agenda (it's long deleted from the Lotus catalog) but you can find it buried on Lotus's public FTP site.
Ten years later, people with PCs are still waiting for such a program. High-profile journalists such as James Fallows still shouts its praises in the pages of "The Atlantic" and more than one group of entrepreneurs has attempted to purchase it from Lotus in recent years. The better part of a decade after Agenda was abandoned by Lotus, it still has adherents. It could pop up on your screen if you wanted it to and included a tiny memo pad, calculator, date book applets and a two-key combination that could toggle the program in and out of your life. Sidekick may have been clumsy but it was an ultimately influential attempt as a digital personal information-management (PIM) program.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO LOTUS 123 PC#
Terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) programs such as Borland's Sidekick was the first attempt that let people clutter their PC desktops with more than one program. In order to move from one program to another, you had to save all your files, close the program, move to a new directory and then invoke the second program most people felt it was too much trouble to switch to Tetris and just kept working on their Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. The Web didn't exist, the Internet was still called the Arpanet, and MCI Mail, Dow Jones News/Retrieval and Compuserve were too expensive to spend much on online. But part of what made those task-switching packages necessary is the one thing about DOS that's charming today: It forced you to focus on one program and on one file at a time.