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Lotus 123 and Symphony on 8" disks

kb2syd

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Mar 7, 2005
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Wantage, NJ
Trying to sort through the thousands of 8" disks in my basement. Stumbled onto an oddity. Three disks. One labeled Lotus 123 and the others Lotus Symphony.

Anyone have any information about Lotus software on 8" disks?

I have no indication, but I think these were from an 8" drive system for the PC.

Thoughts?

I'll try to image these in the near future.
 
Very interesting indeed.

Were these manufacturer original disks or user copied disks?

They could be for a NEC APC. That machine came standard with 8" disk drives.

The Zenith Z-100s can make use of 8" disk drives, and there were at least a couple of 8" disk expansion cards for the IBM PC and hardware clones.

Both Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony required some direct-hardware access, so if this was for a non hardware compatible like the NEC APC then these copies would have been specially tailored for that machine. In that case, they might contain some strings identifying which platform it is for.

Also, the IBM versions of Lotus 1-2-3 (up to 2.01 I think) and Lotus Symphony 1.x were copy protected. So it would be interesting to see if these are also copy protected, official non-protected ports, or manually unprotected versions.

I'm not too surprised to see Lotus 1-2-3 on an 8" disk, as it was ported/available for a few non IBM/DOS systems, but Symphony is a little surprising.
 
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