Quattro Pro for DOS revisited: an obsolete format no more?

28 May 2025
Photo of 3.5 inch installation floppy of Quattro for DOS, version 5.0.
Image sourced from Internet Archive, license unknown.

in 2014 I wrote a post on the Quattro Pro for DOS spreadsheet formats. This documents my attempts at reading a few old Quattro Pro for DOS spreadsheets from my personal archives with modern (at the time) software. Back then, neither Microsoft Excel nor LibreOffice Calc supported these formats. Only the then-current Quattro Pro X7 was able to read the files, but there were several issues related to formatting, rendering of charts, and the handling of external references. Based on these tests, I argued that Quattro Pro for DOS could be a case of that rarest species in the world of digital preservation: a file format that had truly become obsolete!

While working on my previous post about Microsoft Multiplan spreadsheets, I was surprised to see that LibreOffice actually supported this ancient format. A quick glance at LibreOffice’s feature matrix showed that LibreOffice has added support for many legacy formats over the past years, including Quattro Pro for DOS1. Under the hood LibreOffice uses the Microsoft Works format import library (libwps) for this. The same library is also used to read the Microsoft Multiplan for DOS and Lotus 123 file formats. This made me wonder if the conclusions of my 2014 post would still hold up. This follow-up post puts this to the test.


Emulating Microsoft Multiplan spreadsheets in DOSBox-X

19 May 2025
Photo of original box in which Multiplan 2.0 was shipped.
Image sourced from Internet Archive, license unknown.

Last week I was contacted by Tristan Zondag from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision for advice on files he had recovered from some old floppy disks as part of an ongoing digital archaeology project. Based on the files’ byte structure, Tristan suspected that these were Multiplan files. Multiplan is a spreadsheet application that was developed by Microsoft between 1982 and 1990.

However, the files weren’t recognised by DROID, and Tristan also wasn’t able to open them in the original Multiplan software, which is why he asked me to have a look at it. In response to this I did some tests where I ran old MS-DOS versions of the Multiplan software in DOSBox-X.

The main purpose of this post is to document how I made this work. This is probably of interest to others who are working with old Multiplan files. It might also serve as a useful introduction to emulating old MS-DOS software in DOSBox-X.

Since the files from Sound and Vision are subject to access restrictions, I’m not able to share them here. So, all examples in this post are based on publicly available Multiplan files. In the final sections I briefly explain how I used the emulation to make the data in those files accessible in modern software, and I also discuss some alternative options.


Changes to the blog: migration to Codeberg and ActivityPub-based comments

30 April 2025
Illustration of a stylized, icon-like donkey that is pulling a cart with the words bitsgalore.org written on it, walking from left to right. On its left is the Github Octicon logo, and to its right the Codeberg logo, which depicts a mountain.
Donkey and cart icons licensed from the Noun Project. Github Octicon icon from Wikimedia Commons, released under MIT license. Codeberg logo from Wikimedia Commons, released under CC0 1.0.

Ever since its start in late 2013, this blog has been hosted on Github Pages, using the Jekyll static site generator. On a technical level this always worked flawlessly, but in the current geopolitical climate I no longer want my site being hosted at a US-based tech giant. After reviewing some options, I decided to migrate the site to Codeberg Pages, which is operated by a non-profit organization that is based in Germany. I also implemented a new comments system that is based on ActivityPub. This allows readers to post comments with a Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon) account.


Y2K

30 December 2024
Digital Dark Age logo, which depicts a human figure holding a large floppy disk, with to its left the words Digital Dark Age Crew. The background shows the screen of an oscilloscope.
Digital Dark Age Crew logo.

One of the most elusive items in the Digital Dark Age Crew back catalogue is “Y2K”, which deals with the Year 2000 problem. Originally planned as a December 1999 release, the track was never finished due to a succession of technical problems. Some early demos of “Y2K” have surfaced as bootlegs, and many fans of the group rate these amongst the most sought-after Digital Dark Age Crew tracks.


PDF Quality assessment for digitisation batches with Python, PyMuPDF and Pillow

13 December 2024
Photo of the interior of the control room in a fossil fuel power plant. The walls at the back are completely covered with large control panels. In front of it an operator sits at a desk in his chair.
Control room in Fossil fuel power plant in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia. Achim Hering, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This post introduces Pdfquad, a software tool that for automated quality assessment for large digitisation batches. The software was developed specifically for the Digital Library for Dutch Literature (DBNL), but it might be adaptable to other users and organisations as well.



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