Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software. It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles in the business market.
The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, had helped launch the Apple II as one of the earliest personal computers in business use. With IBM's entry into the market, VisiCalc was slow to respond, and when they did, they launched what was essentially a straight port of their existing system despite the greatly expanded hardware capabilities. Lotus's solution was marketed as a three-in-one integrated solution: it handled spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts, hence the name "1-2-3", though how much database capability the product actually had was debatable, given the sparse memory left over after launching 1-2-3. It quickly overtook VisiCalc, as well as Multiplan and SuperCalc, the two VisiCalc competitors.
Lotus 1-2-3 was the state-of-the-art spreadsheet and the standard throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, part of an unofficial set of three stand-alone office automation products that included dBase and WordPerfect, to build a complete business platform. Lotus Software had their own word processor named Lotus Manuscript, which was to some extent acclaimed in academia, but did not catch the interest of the business, nor the consumer market. With the acceptance of Windows 3.0 in 1990, the market for desktop software grew even more. None of the major spreadsheet developers had seriously considered the graphical user interface to supplement their DOS offerings, and so they responded slowly to Microsoft's own GUI-based products Excel and Word. Lotus was surpassed by Microsoft in the early 1990s, and never recovered. IBM purchased Lotus in 1995, and continued to sell Lotus offerings, only officially ending sales in 2013.
History
VisiCalc
was launched in 1979 on the Apple II and immediately became a bestseller. In contrast to earlier programs, VisiCalc allowed for the easy construction of free-form calculation systems for practically any purpose, limited primarily by the memory and speed of the computer. The application was so compelling that many purchased Apple II computers just to run the program. VisiCalc's runaway success on the Apple led to direct bug-compatible ports to other platforms, including Atari 8-bit computers and the Commodore PET. This included the IBM PC when it launched in 1981, and on this platform it quickly became another bestseller, with an estimated 300,000 sales in the first six months on the market.There were well-known problems with VisiCalc, and several competitors appeared to address some of these issues. One early example was 1980's SuperCalc, which solved the problem of circular references, while a slightly later example was Microsoft Multiplan from 1981, which offered larger sheets and other improvements. However, VisiCalc continued to outsell these and all other competitors.
Beginnings
The Lotus Development Corporation was founded by Mitchell Kapor, a friend of the developers of VisiCalc who had written software for it. 1-2-3 was originally written by Jonathan Sachs, who had written two spreadsheet programs while working at Concentric Data Systems, Inc."1-2-3" symbolizes the software's three modules: spreadsheet, business graphics and database. While Kapor had some programming experience, he felt that his design skills were superior, and he was primarily a marketing guru. His ability to develop his product to appeal to non-technical users was one secret to its rapid success. Unlike many technologists, Kapor relied on focus-group feedback to make his user instructions more user-friendly. For example, in response to the instructions that read "Remove the protective cover and insert disc into computer", several focus-group participants tried to tear the stiff plastic envelope from the disc carrier. Kapor's recognition that highly technical instructions needed to be translated to everyday English was a strong reason for the product's popularity.
Lotus spent $1 million for advertising in January and February 1983 in The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Time, Newsweek and computer magazines. Lotus 1-2-3 was released on 26 January 1983 and sold 175,000 copies in its first year, outselling VisiCalc so much that by early 1984 observers expected the latter product to disappear that year. Unlike Microsoft Multiplan, 1-2-3 stayed very close to the model of VisiCalc, including the "A1" letter and number cell notation and slash-menu structure. It was cleanly programmed, relatively bug-free, performant and wrote directly to video memory rather than using the slow DOS or BIOS text-output functions.
Among other novelties that Lotus introduced was a graph maker that could display several forms of graphs but required a graphics card. At this early stage, the only video boards available for the PC were IBM's Color Graphics Adapter and Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter, the latter not supporting any graphics. However, because the two video boards used different RAM and port addresses, both could be installed in the same machine, so Lotus took advantage of this by supporting a "split" screen mode whereby the user could display the worksheet portion of 1-2-3 on the sharper monochrome video and the graphics on the CGA display.
The initial release of 1-2-3 supported only three video setups: CGA, MDA or dual-monitor mode. However, a few months later, support was added for Hercules Computer Technology's Hercules Graphics Adapter, which was a clone of the MDA that allowed bitmap mode. The ability to have high-resolution text and graphics capabilities proved extremely popular and Lotus 1-2-3 is credited with popularizing the Hercules graphics card.
Subsequent releases of Lotus 1-2-3 supported more video standards, including EGA, AT&T/Olivetti and VGA. Significantly, support for the PCjr/Tandy modes was never added, and users of those machines were limited to CGA graphics.
The early versions of 1-2-3 also included a disk copy protection. While 1-2-3 was hard-disk installable, it required insertion of the original floppy disk when starting the application. This protection scheme was easily cracked and posed a minor inconvenience for home users, but it proved to be a serious nuisance in an office setting. Lotus discontinued the copy protection with the 3.0 release. However, it was necessary to initialize the system disk with the user's name and company name in order to customize the copy of the program. Release 2.2 and higher had this requirement. This was an irreversible process unless an exact copy of the original disk had been made, posing challenges for the transfer of program ownership.
The reliance on the specific hardware of the IBM PC led to 1-2-3 being utilized as one of the two stress-test applications, along with Microsoft Flight Simulator, for true 100% compatibility when PC clones appeared in the early 1980s. 1-2-3 required two disk drives and at least 192K of memory, which made it incompatible with the IBM PCjr; Lotus produced a version for the PCjr that was on two cartridges but otherwise identical.
By early 1984, up to 23,000 copies of 1-2-3 were sold monthly. Despite Lotus including high-quality tutorial software, two dozen companies produced books, videocassettes, and other training tools for the spreadsheet. 1-2-3 was a killer app for the IBM PC and compatibles, while hurting sales of computers that could not run it. "They're looking for 1-2-3. Boy, are they looking for 1-2-3!" InfoWorld wrote. Noting that computer purchasers did not want PC compatibility as much as compatibility with certain PC software, the magazine suggested "let's tell it like it is. Let's not say 'PC compatible,' or even 'MS-DOS compatible.' Instead, let's say '1-2-3 compatible. PC clones' advertising did often prominently state that they were compatible with 1-2-3. An Apple II software company promised that its spreadsheet had "the power of 1-2-3". 1-2-3's macro system was the world's most popular application-development language. Because spreadsheets use large amounts of memory, 1‐2‐3 helped popularize greater RAM capacities in PCs, and especially the advent of expanded memory, which allowed greater than 640k to be accessed.
Rivals
By 1988 1-2-3 had dominated the spreadsheet market for five years. Lotus had sold 3.5 million copies, and up to eight million people used the software. Competitors emerged, notably Microsoft's Excel and Borland's Quattro Pro.The first 1-2-3 imitator was Mosaic Software's "The Twin", written in the fall of 1985 largely in the C programming language, followed by VP-Planner, which was backed by Adam Osborne. These were able to not only read 1-2-3 files, but also execute many or most macro programs by incorporating the same command structure. Copyright law had first been understood to only cover the source code of a program. After the success of lawsuits which claimed that the very "look and feel" of a program were covered, Lotus sought to ban any program which had a compatible command and menu structure. Program commands had not been considered to be covered before, but the commands of 1-2-3 were embedded in the words of the menu displayed on the screen. 1-2-3 won its three-year long court battle against Paperback Software International and Mosaic Software Inc. in 1990. However, when it sued Borland over Quattro Pro in Lotus v. Borland, a six-year battle that ended at the Supreme Court in 1996, the final ruling appeared to support narrowing the applicability of copyright law to software; this is because the lower court's decision that it was not a copyright violation to merely have a compatible command menu or language was upheld, but only via stalemate. In 1995, the First Circuit found that command menus are an uncopyrightable "method of operation" under section 102 of the Copyright Act. The 1-2-3 menu structure was itself an advanced version of single letter menus introduced in VisiCalc. When the case came before the Supreme Court, the justices would end up deadlocked 4–4. This meant that Borland had emerged victorious, but the extent to which copyright law would be applicable to computer software went unaddressed and undefined.