Lotus 1-2-3, rebuilt clean-room for the browser — with the one thing 1984 couldn't do: multiple people in the same worksheet at the same time.
This is the third of a trinity. WebWordStar brought back the word processor. WebBaseIII brought back the database. In 1984 the office ran on those two plus a spreadsheet, and this repo is that spreadsheet.
Not emulation. A reimplementation of the 1-2-3 experience, interface kept sacred:
- The slash menu. Press
/and get Worksheet, Range, Copy, Move, File, Print, Graph, Data, Quit — the menu tree that taught a generation what menus were. - @functions:
@SUM,@IF,@AVG,@VLOOKUPand friends. - Keyboard-only cell navigation. F2 to edit, F5 to go to, F9 to recalc.
- The mode indicator in the corner: READY, EDIT, POINT, MENU.
And the modern part, same as the siblings: real-time collaboration. Several people in one worksheet, peer cursors with name tags, edits that converge, undo scoped to your own changes.
Later, when the trinity becomes a suite: period-authentic interchange. WebBaseIII
does COPY TO report TYPE WKS, Web123 opens it. Files, not APIs.
Design phase. Nothing to run yet.
TypeScript, Node, WebSockets, SQLite. Same recipe as the siblings.
Watch the repo, open an issue, or come argue about which @functions shipped in
Release 1A. If your fingers still remember /WEY, I want to hear from you.
Web123 is an independent, clean-room reimplementation built for educational and software-preservation purposes, in the same spirit as its siblings WebWordStar and WebBaseIII. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Lotus Development Corporation, IBM, HCL, or any past or present holder of the "Lotus 1-2-3" trademark. The name "Lotus 1-2-3" appears here only to describe the historical program whose interface this project reimplements. No original Lotus 1-2-3 code or documentation text is used: behavior is implemented from publicly documented interfaces and independent testing against files.
AGPL-3.0-only. Source files carry SPDX license headers.