Russian Mature ((hot)) — Amalia

I never used Lotus Agenda, but I’m told it was a popular productivity tool for MS-DOS in the late 80s. I’ve been on a retro software rediscovery kick lately, so I’ve decided to give it a whirl and write about my experiences. There is something that appeals to me about using long-abandoned software. Perhaps it’s update fatigue, there’s certainly no need to dread a major update breaking something!

Regardless, I’ve always enjoyed finding new productivity tools to try out, and I’m not afraid of steep learning curves or getting my hands dirty. I’ll usually choose powerful and flexible software over simplicity.

At the moment I mostly use taskwarrior, but I’ve lost count of all the others I’ve tried!

Russian Mature ((hot)) — Amalia

Agenda is a PIM, a Personal Information Manager. That term has fallen out of fashion, I think a quick summary might be “anything that manages those small pieces of information we all deal with”. Things like contacts, todo lists, notes, and so on.

I found a 1989 episode of the TV show Computer Chronicles that discussed how people thought about PIMs at the time.

At the 21-minute mark there’s a demonstration of Lotus Agenda, but it’s not easy to follow, watch the clip and you’ll see what I mean. Still, you do see some interesting features:

Some form of NLP is used to extract dates and names from free-form text.
Categories are a little like what we would call tags today.
You can create custom dashboards called views.

Apparently this was an $800 software package (That’s $395 adjusted for inflation from 1989), yikes! You don’t have to pay that, Lotus made it available for free when development ceased.

In preparation for trying out Agenda, I found a copy of the original manuals on eBay for a few dollars. Just look at this monster, the user guide alone is over 700 pages, that’s not including the supplementary guides. The supplements I have are Working with Macros, Working with Definition Files, Setting up Agenda, and a few miscellaneous leaflets.

I guess that’s my bedtime reading taken care of for a while. I actually received the macro reference still in the original shrink wrap, it almost seems a shame to open it!

This piece captures a moment in Amalia's life, a reflection on her past, present, and the stories that have shaped her. It's a glimpse into her inner world, showing her depth, wisdom, and the serene acceptance of her life's journey.

As she took a sip of her tea, Amalia's thoughts turned to her current project—a book she was writing on the influence of Russian folklore on modern literature. It was a subject close to her heart, and she found solace in the words of her ancestors. The characters of her stories, both real and imagined, seemed to come alive in her writing.

Born in 1973, Amalia Mordvinova (also known as Amaliya) is a celebrated figure in Russian theater and film. Often called the "Russian Tilda Swinton" due to her striking appearance and versatile acting style, she established herself as a leading talent in the 1990s and 2000s.

Amalia is rarely just a love interest. She is the advisor, the critic, or the protector. Her maturity brings a brutal honesty that younger characters lack. She will tell you the truth about love, money, and death in a single cigarette break.

Finding Grace: The Timeless Appeal of Amalia (Russian Mature Aesthetic) Subtitle: Why age is an asset in the world of Slavic portraiture.

Unlike Western characters who externalize their trauma, Amalia represents the stoic survivalist. The mature Russian woman in media often carries the weight of the Soviet collapse, the 1990s upheaval, or a quiet immigration story. Her face is a map of endurance, not of complaint.

In Russian culture, a mature Amalia is frequently viewed through several distinct lenses:

The sun began to dip, casting a golden glow across the room. Amalia felt a sense of peace wash over her. This was her favorite time of day, a moment of pause before the world decided to fill her ears with noise again. She closed her eyes, letting the calm envelop her.

Russian Mature ((hot)) — Amalia

You probably need to use other applications or services, and sync your data with your phone. Writing and reading files from outside DOSEMU is no problem, so if you just want to sync files this is no problem.

As it’s a terminal application you can also just SSH in and run it.

You probably also want to have your appointments sync with your calendar or something.

Export

There are two ways to export data from Agenda. If you have a commandline tool that you can pass arguments to, then you can write a macro that will invoke it. amalia russian mature

Otherwise, you can export your data to a file.

Files

Agenda can export items to a format called STF, Structured Text File. The specification for that format is (mostly) documented in the manual, but it didn’t catch on.

I wrote a quick parser that can convert it to JSON, so now you can use modern tools like jq to manipulate and transform the data however you wish. This piece captures a moment in Amalia's life,

You can download it here, here are some examples.

Print a list of all items.
- $ ./stfjson < transfer.stf | jq '.[].items[].text'
Show all items with a due date.
- $ ./stfjson < transfer.stf | jq '.[].items[] | select(.categories[].name=="\\When")'

And so on, there are more examples in the README. If you can exchange data with other apps, you can now use stfjson to generate the correct format.

You can automate exports, Agenda has “Special Actions” in the category options. Alternatively, if it’s just a one off or for a macro, you can use the Transfer > Export command. It was a subject close to her heart,

Commands

In DOSEMU, the UNIX command will invoke a shell command on the host.

C:\>unix uname
Linux

If there is a commandline tool that will import data, e.g. a TaskWarrior user might use task add drop off laundry at dry cleaners, then you can create a macro in Agenda that simply launches that command.

You can use something like {F10}ULUNIX task {TYPE;%TASKTEXT}.

Import

Surprisingly, Agenda supports importing arbitrary text data. One of the manuals that came with agenda was Working with Definition Files, which explains how to write a configuration file that allow Agenda to parse anything.

It even has a Regular Expression tutorial, pretty impressive for a 1980s consumer product.

Russian Mature ((hot)) — Amalia

I quite like Agenda. It does many things well, but it’s absolutely true you could replicate most of it’s functionality with modern tools. However, I do enjoy using it, and I’m a big enough nerd that I quite like the challenge of using retro software.

I think the closest modern equivalent to Agenda would be taskwiki. It’s not a perfect match, but if you liked some of what you saw here but are not interested in retro software, try it out!

I’m still using Agenda after two weeks, and about 40% of the way through the manual 😂

Russian Mature ((hot)) — Amalia

Bob Newell’s Agenda Page has lots of old documentation. In particular, I found this old Lotus Support FAQ from 1990 fascinating.