Lotus 1-2-3 and Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc are the two most historically interesting spreadsheet apps of their era. By comparison, 1-2-3 was a frickin' Broadway show. When you used a system lacking multitasking (like the IBM PC's DOS or the Apple II), putting together an integrated report (spreadsheet, graphs, words) was frustrating if you had to use lots of apps. It eliminated the so-called "floppy shuffle" of using multiple apps to get your work done. This period video gives you a sense of what a big deal 1-2-3 was. Because it had a broad feature set and was crazy-fast, an office worker in 1983 could spend the day in 1-2-3 and get a lot done.
This led to a homogeneous IBM clone landscape, while the rest of the personal computer industry was spawning various competing systems with their own ecosystems of software - some good, some great, some crappy - but none of which could run Lotus 1-2-3 in its original form.īeyond its speed, 1-2-3 offered charting and graphing, macros, basic database functions, and could even be used as a simplistic word processor. Without perfect compatibility, a clone couldn't run 1-2-3, and indeed testing your clone against 1-2-3 was one way to know whether it was ready for primetime.
When you bought a PC clone in the 1980s that promised "100% compatibility" with a true blue IBM machine, that was a nod to apps like 1-2-3 that relied on the specific quirks of the IBM PC's video system. That IBM PC-exclusive decision was also surprisingly crucial when PC clones began to appear. Apps like VisiCalc existed on multiple platforms, though they generally failed to perform as well, in part because it had to serve multiple kinds of systems.
Locking your app into the IBM PC hardware ecosystem was a moderately gutsy business move at the time if 1-2-3 didn't take off on the IBM PC, it would be harder to move it to another platform because of all its IBM-specific coding (assembling and custom graphics).
This design decision had two outcomes: first, it made the screen update faster (making the program respond faster to user actions like scrolling) second, it meant that the app was locked into the IBM PC hardware. In addition to its assembly roots, 1-2-3 used special graphics routines that wrote directly to the IBM PC's video memory, rather than passing each character through the operating system to paint onto the screen. In other words, let the programmers suffer the pain of coding in a language that was Greek to them - the users would reap the rewards when their program ran quickly. Writing in that computerese assembly language was more difficult for programmers than using a high-level language like C, but the resulting programs ran much faster on the plodding computers of the day. 1-2-3 was written in assembly language, "close to the metal" as computer nerds like to say. Kapor succeeded, and Lotus went public in October of 1983. Mitch Kapor, a friend of the developers of VisiCalc, founded Lotus Development Corporation and set out to own the IBM PC market for spreadsheets. When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, users wanted to see its killer app - where was its VisiCalc? (VisiCalc was actually ported to DOS, though it had some limitations.) The "where's my killer app" answer soon came when Lotus 1-2-3 arrived in early 1983. It's hard to imagine now what a revolution this was, but if your job was running the budget every few days, it was sheer magic to change some number and hit Return, then see the updated numbers ripple through automagically.
Computer spreadsheets also allowed easy forecasting - "What if we sold 10% more this year, or got this part for 5% off?" - with instant results.
Simply having a computer re-run the same series of computations saved office workers tons of time, and eliminated some of the worst drudgery associated with finance. In the late 70s this was a huge deal - prior to computerized spreadsheet programs, "spreadsheets" were literally big pieces of paper, and you had to do the math yourself every time any value changed. In 1979, the Apple II series found its killer app for small business in VisiCalc, a spreadsheet that automated basic calculations like managing a budget, balancing a checkbook, or keeping track of a (relatively small) supply chain.
In the early years of personal computing, each computer system had a "killer app" that made the entire machine worth buying just for that piece of software. Facing a horde of competitors including VisiCalc (the original Apple II "killer app"), Multiplan (from Microsoft), Supercalc (running on CP/M) and Context MBA, 1-2-3 was an upstart, but it had an edge: it was fast.īefore we dig in deeper, here's a clip from Triumph of the Nerds showing Lotus 1-2-3 as the IBM PC's first killer app: On January 26, 1983, a spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3 burst onto the personal computing scene.