Lotus 1-2-3 Launched 30 Years Ago Today
Written by Historian   
Saturday, 26 January 2013

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that propelled businesses large and small to buy and use PCs to deal with everyday financial operations.

Lotus 1-2-3 first went on sale on 26 January, 1983 and met with runaway success - not only for the software but also for the hardware required to run it. In many ways it was the spreadsheet in general, and 1-2-3 in particular, that was responsible for pulling the personal computer out of the hobby market and into the professional arena.

In an interview for The Register, Mitch Kapor, co-founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the person responsible for marketing 1-2-3 said:

“It was a product that really legitimized the PC worldwide as a general business tool for non-technical users.

It was the Google or Facebook of its time. The market size was orders of magnitude smaller but the magnitude was the same.”

advert

Version 1 of 1-2-3 not only made full use of the IBM PC, it actually demanded that you buy more hardware. While the standard models of the time shipped with 64KBytes of RAM installed, 1-2-3 needed 256KBytes - a very high memory requirement for those days.

Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't the first spreadsheet - that honor goes to Visicalc, invented by Dan Bricklin and programmed by Bob Frankston which originally ran on the Apple II. Its TRS-80 version had been ported to run on the IBM, as had Microsoft's MAC-based spreadsheet Multiplan.

Although we tend to associate Mitch Kapor's name with Lotus 1-2-3 the person responsible for programming it was Jonathan Sachs who had already written a spreadsheet for Data General's DG minicomputers and had the rights to it. He approached Kapor who had the vision to choose the the PC, and more precisely on PC-DOS, one of its three operating systems, as the way of the future. 

 

123screendos

 

For more of the story, see Mitch Kapor and Lotus 1-2-3 in our History section.

 

More Information

Lotus 1-2-3 turns 30 (The Register)

Related Articles

Lotus 1-2-3 Designer Turns 60

Mitch Kapor and Lotus 1-2-3

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

 

Banner


Apache Arrow 21 Released
07/07/2025

Version 21 of Apache Arrow has been released, including the first official Swift implementation of the platform. Improvements to Arrow 21 include exposing gRPC in the Flight client builder and improve [ ... ]



MCP Developers Summit - The Talks
11/07/2025

MCP has taken the industry by storm just one year after its appearance. And now we have an MCP Summit, run by the trend setters themselves!


More News

pico book

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

Last Updated ( Friday, 04 July 2025 )