However, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a "modern" terminal floss office suite.
Lotus is not is not open source. You would need to get IBM to release it as open source, which of course means they would have to have the code stored somewhere. While we're at it we can get microsoft to release the dos versions of works and visual basic, and whoever owns wordperfect to release that.
Wordperfect at least existed for Unix platforms so might be somewhat portable to linux. I don't remember Lotus or Microsoft ever being on Unix back in the day. Though Lotus did have Improv on the NeXT so maybe they did...
I installed the SCO Xenix 386 version for several customers. This was a port of the text-mode codebase, roughly equivalent to WordPerfect 5 for DOS. (Generally regarded by WP cognoscenti as the best version: either 4.2 or 5.1 depending who you ask.) WordPerfect's legendarily rich printer support really came into its own for Xenix, which was poor on printer support.
WordPerfect for Linux made it to version 8, and was bundled with Corel LinuxOS, the first desktop distro to boast a graphical display-settings dialog, for instance. It was based on Debian with a heavily-modified version of KDE to make it more Windows-like.
There were free versions of Corel LinuxOS which have a free and slightly cut-down version of WordPerfect, and a paid version with a full unlimited WordPerfect. I own a boxed copy.
I have WordPerfect 8.1 running on Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit. There is no antialiasing, so it looks rather ugly, but it's blazingly fast.
It used to be a major pain to install, but there are new scripts as of last year to simplify it: http://www.xwp8users.com/
I am not aware of a native text-mode version of WordPerfect for Linux, but WordPerfect 6 for DOS (the final DOS version) runs very well under DOSemu.
> Lotus 1-2-3 was ported to a bunch of systems, including OpenVMS, Xenix, and even System/390. In 1991, Lotus released a version for SunOS4 on SPARC.
Word (according to Wikipedia):
> ... were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS (1985), AT&T UNIX PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989), SCO Unix (1994), and macOS (2001).
Excel was originally a Mac program, but hasn't been available on any Unix platform since (as far as I can tell.)
- Wordgrinder/groff+mom+jstar as word processors. Well,
the second is not a "word processor" as today, but the
syntax is dumbed down from groff with the Mom macros to
write up something complex without getting mad with the troff/nfroff syntax. And, yes, you can use eqn(1)/pic(1)/tbl(1)/grap(1) and chem(1) on it in the exact
same way.
However, I wonder if all this work could contribute to a "modern" terminal floss office suite. There are a number of projects, but they are scattered:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/115548