The Great Lakes Geek is sad that the Lotus name has been
removed from the Notes/Domino name and the Lotusphere conference. It’s hard to believe that it was way back in
1995 that IBM bought Lotus, essentially for the Lotus Notes product line.
I don’t think you can overestimate the importance of Lotus 1-2-3
to the PC industry. Jonathan Sachs had written
a couple electronic spreadsheets and he and Mitch Kapor created Lotus in 1982
and released Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC in 1983.
Lotus 1-2-3 is the main reason that businesses bought PCs. It made the IBM PC the world standard. In fact, the common test for a clone PC to be
IBM PC compatible was that it be able to run Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Flight
Simulator (to test the graphics). There
was even a rumor that Microsoft would intentionally change DOS just enough to
mess up 1-2-3. The motto was 'DOS ain't
done till Lotus won't run.’'
If you are old enough, you may recall the first time you set
up a spreadsheet and then changed a field (maybe a tax rate from 10 to 12%) and
recalculated and watched the values update.
What power! The Geek actually first witnessed this with VisiCalc on a
TRS-80. 1-2-3 soon eclipsed VisiCalc
and Microsoft’s Multiplan never did offer much competition.
The product was called 1-2-3 because it had 3 functions: Spreadsheet,
Charting/Graphing and Database. Of
course the database and graphing functions seem prehistoric when viewed against
Access or Excel but it was a big deal back then. And many people used 1-2-3 as their only app,
including as a word processor. They
loaded 1-2-3 in the morning and stayed in it all day. The familiar A1 row/column screen was burnt
into many CRT monitors.
Lotus 1-2-3 did not have the burden of accommodating modern
GUIs. The first versions were written in
x86 Assembler Language (V 3.0 switched to C) and they wrote directly to video
memory rather than slower OS or BIOS output.
It was fast!
As companies relied on 1-2-3 more and more, they soon
reached the 640K limits of the PC and the industry developed expanded memory to
break the 640k barrier. I spent a lot of
time on Quarterdeck’s QEMM eking out some precious extra kb of memory.
Lotus 1-2-3 was the first killer app and dominated for a
decade. The beginning of the end came
when Lotus lost the famous “look and feel” lawsuit against Borland and their
Quattro Pro spreadsheet. The port from Assembler
to C took more time than expected and in the meantime Microsoft launched Excel
for the Mac. As Windows grew market
share, Excel for Windows grew with it.
Lotus Symphony was the successor to 1-2-3 offering an integrated
suite including a word processor.
Symphony and the Lotus SmartSuite never gained the dominance and market
share of 1-2-3 despite being excellent products. I still find the dragging of a completed task
in Lotus Organizer to a trash can and seeing it burst into flames as the most satisfying
of any PIM/calendar. (remember PIMs?)
The Lotus name was revived with their revolutionary groupware
program Notes which incorporated network communication and sharing. It’s a terrific product but more for the
enterprise whereas 1-2-3 was on every desktop, consumer or business.
Many software companies of that era could be identified with
the CEO or other key player: Philippe Khan at Borland, Bill Gates at Microsoft,
Gordon Eubanks at Symantec and so on. These,
and many others, were supporters of user groups and spoke at the Association of
PC User Groups (APCUG) annual meetings at Comdex in Las Vegas.
While Lotus had a presence, and some terrific user group
reps (I remember Elena Fernandez – who else?), I don’t recall visits from Mitch
Kapor, Ray Ozzie, Jim Manzi or other Lotus bigwigs. Maybe my APCUG pals will correct me on this.
Just as we will never have someone like Walter Cronkite
being viewed by most Americans, we will never again see a program dominate like
Lotus 1-2-3. For a trip down memory
lane, you can download (legally) and play with early spreadsheets such as
VisiCalc from Dan Bricklin’s page.
Looking forward to other “mature” Geeks comments.
