from Hacker News

Debugging Lotus 1-2-3 by fax

by jgrahamc on 3/31/25, 3:23 PM with 19 comments

by mattl on 3/31/25, 3:33 PM
I used to work at the Free Software Foundation. I would get a lot of letters from prisoners who wanted copies of our books, people asking for a printed copy of the GPL and Google once sent thousands of AdWords flyers with seeds embedded in the paper
Why thousands? They’d attempted to figure out the address for a bunch of small websites and their search had concluded that they were all run by the FSF.
They were not. They were all Joomla websites with the GPL linked in the footer. I always thought that would be my strangest tale but no..
Someone once sent me a 10-12 page fax with printed pages of gnu.org with handwritten translations on it. A few days later they faxed me asking if I had received the pages and wanting to know when they were going to be on the website.
I tracked down their email address, and put them in touch with the translator for their language. Again via email.
Apparently they felt that a visual representation would be easier.
Does anyone else remember the email to fax relay of tpc.int? Used that more than once in the mid-90s at my first job which had a heavy fax culture as most of our clients were not yet using the internet. One of my first jobs was getting the office onto a single Internet connection (and provider) and then getting a reseller account for our ISP setup so we could offer dial up and IMAP email to our customers.
by chiffre01 on 3/31/25, 3:33 PM
Mandatory link to 1-2-3 running on Linux
https://github.com/taviso/123elf?tab=readme-ov-file
by cube00 on 3/31/25, 4:54 PM
I'd almost forgotten what it's like for a blog post to embrace that it's a short story and not drone on for pages to pad it out.
by shrubble on 3/31/25, 7:21 PM
I like it! My own proudest moment was walking a non technical user through using “vi” to edit a config file on a SCO Unix server… over the phone.
by pfoof on 3/31/25, 6:39 PM
I wouldn't necessarily call it debugging, more like "remote helpdesk". Either way, this is a brilliant way to "compress" instructions.
by wazoox on 3/31/25, 9:08 PM
OK, story time. I probably mentioned already that I did the computer graphics for World Cup 98 worldwide TV broadcast. The setup was using two SGI Octane MXI, controlled from a PC running a custom application driving the two Octanes, on each of the ten stadiums across France. On each site a local team managed the system; one guy using the graphics remote control PC in the OB truck, a couple of other guys entering manually statistic data on other remote control PCs, and another monitoring everything and sorting out problems.
For a lot of reasons, the development of the remote control application (written in Visual Basic 4.2 IIRC) was a painful death march that had began a too few short weeks before WC98 went live, weeks during which I've worked 100 hours a week and more, sleeping under my desk on which were the development Octane and PCs; I suppose many can relate.
As the remote control application was so late, it evolved almost daily during the World Cup; we basically debugged it at night, compiled and tested it during the day, pushed the binaries to our central server (an Origin 2000) through ISDN, binaries that the on-site team had to download and install before each and every match, after calling me to know the eventual problems to sort out.
The main point was that all features weren't ready from the beginning; during the first few weeks, the daily release of the software could only manage the things that were supposed to be happening in the field.
So one night I was (finally) home and I suddenly saw a match starting live on TV, in Lyon. And I realised Carlos (the local team manager in Lyon) hadn't called me about the daily software update. So I called Carlos while the match was beginning : "No worries", he said. "Yesterday's software worked fine, and I know you're tired so I managed it myself". "OK, but did you install today's update?" "What for? Yesterday's release was fine". "It was all fine yesterday", I replied, "but tonight is the first match which can have extra time and penalties. Yesterday's release doesn't manage penalties so I really hope we won't need it". Yeah, you know how this ends already...
Because you know, downloading the software through ISDN and installing it wasn't really an option once the match had begun...
What do you think happened? I watched the game going on and score stuck 0 to 0... And going to extra time... Still 0 - 0 at the end of extra time... Penalties! Time for improvising, live in front of about 2 billions spectators, isn't that nice? From that moment and until the end, I was on the phone with Carlos. First, to allow for a proper display, we had to reset the score to track the penalties like actual goals.
Then at last came the tough moment, displaying the final score, by filling in all data manually. I could only see the result live, on my home TV, hoping for the best... "OK, as the remote control software won't work, you'll have to manipulate the Octane directly" (which of course was never envisioned, and he had absolutely zero experience of). "Hit exactly all the keys as I tell you : on the numpad, hit 5000, then enter. Hit tab twice, press 3. Hit tab once, press 4. Hit tab twice, press 4. Hit tab once, press 3. Hit tab 3 times, press 0. Hit tab once, press 0. Press Ctrl + *. Press Ctrl + Enter. Call the OB truck and tell them to send in the picture".
It went all right in the end, but boy it was tiring.
by renewedrebecca on 4/1/25, 2:43 PM
I remember back in those days trying to lead a plant supervisor through installing some custom software on a MS-DOS machine from floppies.
"No, not the slash under the question mark key, the other one."
5 Minutes Later...
"No, not the slash under the question mark key, the other one."
by jgalt212 on 3/31/25, 8:45 PM
Faxes took about 45 seconds per page. I think this particular bug could have been resolved with a 90 second phone conversation. The fax cost savings were small, but still a neat story.