I mentioned VisiCalc not long ago and Lotus 1-2-3 just this week. Yesterday, a new issue of Stone Tools came out, nicely tying the story together.

Stone Tools is a project by Christopher Drum where he grabs old productivity apps, spools up the correct emulator, and writes a review from today’s perspective. I like the emulation part – Drum even provides specific instructions so you could do it, too – and the fact he’s actually putting the tools through their paces.

Anyway, Drum reviewed VisiCalc a few months ago, and Lotus 1-2-3 yesterday.

The reviews can probably be a bit intense if you are unfamiliar with the territory, but you will be rewarded with a lot more detail than just casual understanding of these apps. Reading about VisiCalc first and 1-2-3 second really drives home how “VisiCalc walked so 1-2-3 could run” and it’s fun to see the beginnings of spreadsheet conventions that we take for granted today, for example $ absolute addressing:

In VisiCalc I’m prompted for a “relative or fixed?” decision for every cell reference in every target cell. Replicate a formula with 5 cell references across a column of 100 cells and be ready to answer 5 x 100 prompts. Unfortunate and unavoidable.

Like always, one can find inspiration in surprising places. In the review of Lotus 1-2-3, there’s this interesting tidbit:

The more I encounter [the horizontal menu-bar], the more I wonder if we gave up on it too soon. This could be “blogger overly immersed in their subject matter” brain, but I’m growing to oftentimes prefer two-line horizontal menus over modern GUI menus. […]

It also provides something GUI menus don’t: an immediate explanation of a menu item before committing its action to the document. If a menu item is not a sub-menu, line two describes it. It’s easy to audit features in an unknown program.

I have just been pondering that maybe we moved away from status bars and question mark (Windows)/balloon (Mac) help too soon – pretty much everything these days relies on tooltips – and this slotted right into that.

Anyway. Drum seems to be having fun with the project, and I appreciate that. There are little custom visuals and jokes in every post. Also, as an example, you can download an absolutely delightful recreation of VisiCalc called PicoCalc and run it on your Mac. I have never expected a spreadsheet to be so cute:

And it’s not just most well-known tools. What astonished me in the review of Scala Multimedia in January is how absolutely gorgeous the software (which I’ve never seen before) looked:

This ain’t Windows 3.1; just that palette alone is worth bringing back.

Not going to excerpt more, but there is a lot more. Check out Stone Tools and the 13 programs reviewed so far!