The code name for MS Office during development was Buddha because it was “going to assume the Lotus position.”
There’s a long-standing bug in Excel, dating back to the original release, where it thinks 1900 is a leap year. This isn’t a mistake, though, Microsoft coded it this way because Lotus 1-2-3 thought 1900 was a leap year, and they wanted to be compatible so they could import Lotus spread sheets. However, by doing this, they locked themselves in, and they need to continue to have this bug even today to be compatible with old Excel spreadsheets.
And before Lotus, there was sc (which you can still use today, if you prefer staying in the CLI as much as possible).
More like visicalc, really, but sc is close.
Don’t remind me of that. I wrote a spreadsheed spread over about ten files (for memory size reasons, and they had maxxed out the memory on the machine already). Every month, some poor being had to type in the results from the mainframe printouts into one sheet, then the data was referenced through a bunch of intermediate sheets that distributed the numbers in very creative ways, and then a final spreadsheet was called up to get all numbers referenced together to print them into the proper forms. Luckily there was some field referencing across files, or that would have become a real nightmare.
