All very true. I am one of the people who did not appreciate macros when I was using Lotus, and moved to excel when I learned that lotus statements worked on excel. But I never understood the power of macros — I always turned them off. Part of the reason was that I was not doing anything complex, but the other reason was that I moved on to other languages although I still do my personal spreadsheets on excel.
However, I became a user of Fortran, Algol, Cobal, assy language, and much later JAVA as an instructor. So I did understand the incredible power of the computer. As an engineer, I learned to work with VHDL as well, although not a proficient user, more of a trouble shooter and follower after someone else wrote the code. It has been a great career. Thanks for revisiting those days with me.
I was introduced to Lotus 123 macros by a part time professor that I had to fill in for fairly frequently because he had another better paying job. I had taken a couple of classes from him before I became a lab assistant. He was actually the father of one of my best friends in high school. Up until that time I had thought that they were mostly just meant for copying key strokes. He recommended a couple of books that really opened my eyes. But shortly after that I got a job working for a fire department and at the time it seemed like a better way to pay the bills. The schedule allowed me to do a whole lot of playing and I got married. So this all got put on the back burners.
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.