I didn’t start using Lotus 123 until 1987 so the macro language had already matured somewhat and others had discovered ways to take good advantage of it. I am always surprised by the number of people who claim that the language was extremely limited and only capable of recording keystrokes when in fact it was capable of doing a great deal more than just recording key strokes.
Of course Excel was the obvious winner after Windows replaced DOS and became the standard. But it was still quite awhile before I actually made the switch from Word Perfect and Lotus 123 and this was more for collaborative purposes than my personal needs. I still have boxes with one of the later versions of Lotus Smart Suite along with early DOS versions.
Speaking of memories though... what about those amazing programmable calculators we coveted back then? Now you can emulate them all on your phone, but it is not the same.
Well yes, My first wife worked at HP and she came home with an early HP 45. Wow! I did learn to program it to do long calculations, It was a fantastic advance. I also am a supporter of the reverse polish system that was used, and seems to have lost out to standard equals sign math.
I was teaching then and planned to keep the thing as a memento of the incredible jump into high density chip design. It even had the bug about taking a natural log of one value that the algorithm got wrong. But it disappeared from my briefcase at a school assembly so I lost it.
Somehow I also lost my Pickett slide rule that got me through engineering school.