“He had kept tape backups from old BBS systems, and was able to recover a warez copy of the SDK – unbelievable!”
Lotus charged $395 for the add-in SDK, and every legitimate copy is gone. The developers who wrote add-ins kept no backups because 1-2-3 was the biggest name in software. A ’90s BBS sysop’s tapes also held 1-2-3 for UNIX, a version widely thought lost, and that COFF object file became a native Linux port. The software industry preserved nothing. The pirates preserved everything.