Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3 is a Spreadsheet program from Lotus Software
(now part of IBM ). It was the
IBM PC 's first Killer Application ; its huge popularity in the
mid- 1980s contributed significantly to the success of IBM PC
in the corporate environment.

The Lotus Development Corporation was founded by Mitchell Kapor , a
friend of the developers of VisiCalc . 1-2-3 was originally written by
Jonathan Sachs , who had written two spreadsheet programs before while working at Concentric Data Systems, Inc.

1-2-3 was released on January 26 , 1983 , started outselling
then-most-popular VisiCalc the very same year, and for a number of
years it was the leading spreadsheet for the DOS Operating System . Unlike Microsoft Multiplan , it stayed very close to the model of Visicalc, including the "A1" letter and number cell notation, and slash - menu structure. It was also free of notable bugs, and being written entirely in Assembly Language , was very fast.

The name "1-2-3" stemmed from the product's integration of three main capabilities. Along with being a spreadsheet, it also offered integral charting/graphing and rudimentary database operations.

Data features included sorting data in a column. Justifying text in a range into paragraphs allowed it
to be used as a primitive word processor.

It had keyboard-driven pop-up menus as well as one-key commands,
making it fast to operate. It was also user-friendly, introducing what
might have been the first ever context-sensitive help on the F1 key.

Macro s and add-ins (introduced in version 2.0) attributed much
to 1-2-3's popularity, allowing dozens of outside vendors to sell
macro packages and add-ins ranging from dedicated financial worksheets
to full-fledged Word Processor s. (In the single-tasking MS-DOS
1-2-3 was sometimes used as a complete environment.) Lotus 1-2-3
supported EGA and later VGA
graphics. Early versions used the filename extension "WKS", which was
changed for version 2.0 to "WK1".

Version 2 introduced macros with syntax and commands similar in
complexity to an advanced BASIC interpreter, as well as string
variable expressions. Later versions supported multiple worksheets,
and were written in C. The author of The Twin , a 1-2-3
work-alike implemented in "C" discovered that some of the more
interesting innovations were natural recalculation order, which
reserved a location in each cell for storing the return addess for an
interative tree-walk of formulas. A book published its file format,
which showed how files and formulas were encoded, and how they were
evaluated on a stack. By contrast, decoding the full extent of the
Excel file format remains an open source project today. Strings
were encoded as a special case of IEEE floating point numbers. Sorting
had the interesting behavior of sorting time taking N times as long
for N many items, which was consistent with a Shell Sort .

The fast display of decimal numbers without floating point hardware
was probably accomplished by multiplying the Mantissa by 10 with shift

10 = x --- (4 + 1) --- 2, so x --- 10 = (x << 2 + x) << 1.

registers and "short" pointers. C compilers required long (segment and
offset) pointers and passed numbers on the stack. The Twin was about
twice as large and half as fast by comparison. 1-2-3 also bypassed the
BIOS, directly updating screen memory. 1-2-3, along with Microsoft Flight Simulator , became the standard of PC compatibility. The speed of 1-2-3
made it possible to give more responsive performance than much larger
minicomputers, or even web based applications today.

Lotus 1-2-3 inspired imitators, the first of which was Mosaic
Software's " The Twin ", written largely by Arthur Hu in the fall of
1985, followed by VP-Planner , which was backed by Adam Osborne.
Copyright law had first been understood to only cover the source code
of a program. After the success of suits which claimed that the very
"look and feel" of a program were protected led Lotus to seek to ban
any program which had a compatible command and menu structure.
Computer languages had never been considered to be protected before,
but the "language" of 1-2-3 were embedded in the words of the menu
displayed on the screen. They won in a weakly defended case against
Mosaic Software. However when their sights were set on Quattro Pro from Borland , the courts finally ruled that it was not a
copyright violation to merely have a compatible command menu or
language. In 1995, the First Circuit found that command menus are an uncopyrightable "method of operation" under section 102(b) of the Copyright Act. The 1-2-3 menu structure (example, slash File Erase) was
itself an advanced version of single letter menus introduced in
Visicalc . Letter accelerators which
are still present in DOS and Windows and some web applications today,
and are still often absent in Apple and Unix based applications.

The rise of Microsoft Windows in the personal computer market was
accompanied by the rise in Microsoft 's competing spreadsheet,
Excel , and it gradually usurped the position of
1-2-3. Being loyal to OS/2 , Lotus was slow to embrace Windows. At first, a complete rewrite was planned to overtake Excel, but this project failed to produce a finished product. 1-2-3 for Windows is still simply a graphical wrapper around the original interface.
Additionally, several versions of 1-2-3 were available concurrently,
each with different set of functionality and slightly different
interface.

1-2-3's intended successor, Lotus Symphony , was Lotus's entry into
the anticipated "integrated software" market. It intended to expand
the rudimentary all-in-one 1-2-3 support into full-fledged of
spreadsheet, graph, database and word processor windows, but none of
the integrated packages ever really succeeded. 1-2-3 migrated to the
Windows platform, where it remains available as part of Lotus SmartSuite . Since then, Microsoft Office , including Excel ,
PowerPoint , Access and Word has become the all-in-one
software most commonly found on desktops.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Lotus website

1983 The PC Era--Lotus 1-2-3

Information About ™

Lotus 1-2-3

Information About ^{^™}