Downloads
Everything you can actually download.
These are direct links, not landing pages. The Internet Archive hosts the manuals as OCR text, searchable PDF, and EPUB. I checked that each one actually downloads rather than only being readable in a browser.
The six original manuals
Tavis Ormandy scanned and uploaded these in 2020. The item date is 1989. Each title links to a searchable PDF, and the OCR text is the fastest thing to grep.
| Manual | Also as | |
|---|---|---|
| Users Guide Over 700 pages, and the exhaustive behavioral spec. Part IV, chapters 18 through 21, is the condition and action syntax the CACM paper only gestures at; I read it on 11 September 2026 and it's now in the idea. | OCR text | 19 MB |
| Working with Definition Files The TXT2STF import converter. Appendix B specifies the STF format at the tag level, which is the thing everyone believed was missing. | OCR text | 5 MB |
| Working with Macros The macro language. | OCR text | 3 MB |
| Starter Applications Prebuilt category structures Lotus shipped as examples. They're the closest thing to a set of worked designs. | OCR text | 3 MB |
| Setting Up Agenda Installation and configuration. | OCR text | 3 MB |
| Quick Start The short introduction. Start here if you want the feel of it in twenty minutes. | OCR text | 2 MB |
All six also exist as EPUB and hOCR on the item page. I confirmed the format list against the Archive.org metadata API on 6 September 2026.
The program
Lotus released Agenda 2.0 as freeware after development stopped. Binaries only, and the source has never been released. It runs under DOSBox and DOSEMU2, which makes it a live oracle rather than a museum piece.
| Source | Note |
|---|---|
| Preinstalled ZIP - Bob Newell This bypasses the original floppy copy protection. The page describes it, but no download link came back when I fetched the page, so treat it as unverified. You don't need it: the original disk images below install cleanly under DOSBox Staging with the four floppies mounted as a swappable stack, which is how the screens on this site were made. | easiest |
Official Lotus freeware FTP, via the Internet Archive
Where Lotus put 2.0 when development stopped. The host is gone: www2.support.lotus.com no longer resolves, so the live URL is dead and this is the July 2021 snapshot. The Archive still serves the real files, which I checked rather than assumed: ag_disk.zip is 1.9 MB of actual zip, alongside ag_upb.zip, legal.zip, and pifico.zip.
|
original |
| WinWorld - Agenda 2.0 Also 1.x, if you want to see what changed. | mirror |
| old-games.com · vetusware More mirrors, for when one of the others is down. | mirror |
Running it
What you need around the binary, plus the configuration files someone already worked out.
| Tool | Kind |
|---|---|
| DOSBox Staging What I use, on a Mac. Version 0.83 mounts all four floppy images as one swappable stack, so the copy-protected installer runs unmodified, and its local REST API reads the emulated machine's memory - which is how every screen on this site was captured, straight out of text-mode video RAM. | emulator |
| DOSEMU2 Ormandy's emulator of choice. Its terminal mode translates VGA text mode into escape sequences, so Agenda runs inside an ordinary terminal. | emulator |
| dosemurc · screenrc · screenrc-dosemu Ormandy's working configuration files. They'll save you an afternoon. | config |
| agenda-sample.ps · agenda-sample.pdf What Agenda's print path produces: Ormandy's sample PostScript file, 8 KB, and the PDF made from it, 11 KB. | output |
| Agenda FAQ - Ormandy Copy protection, keybindings, and what to do when the display garbles. | docs |
| SCANCODE.COM A DOS TSR that simulates keystrokes an emulator won't pass through, such as Alt-F3. | utility |
Code
What people have built with it, from it, and after it.
| Project | License |
|---|---|
| Beeswax A Rust TUI reimplementation. It was abandoned in 2008, restarted in 2026, and in daily use by April. It's the proof that the engine tier is doable. | MIT |
| stfjson Converts Agenda's STF export format to JSON. It was written against inferred structure, which makes it worth revisiting now that Appendix B of the Definition Files manual turns out to specify the format. | - |
| President's Planner documentation The documentation for the major commercial third-party add-on. |
Reading
| Document | Format |
|---|---|
| “Agenda: A Personal Information Manager” - CACM 33(7), July 1990 The architecture paper, full text. This transcription dropped the figure references, so the illustrations are missing. The ACM Digital Library has the original. | HTML |
| Agenda FAQ, 2006 revision - Tony Kan This one carries the real scaling limits. | HTML |
| Agenda 2.0 help file The in-product help, which Michael Rourke converted to searchable HTML. | HTML |