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

Mitch Kapor, a frienf of bricklin's and Frankston's, wrote a few programs that could be used with VisiCalc to do statistical analysis and plot graphs. He sold these programs for $1 million and used the meney to start Lotus Development Corporation. Not satisfied with the large amount of work involved in graphing spreadsheet data using a separate program, Kapor conceived of combing, or intergrating, the two functions into a programe so that graphs could be displayed by just pressing a sungle key. He joined with Jonathan Sachs, a programmer who had already developed three spreadsheet programs for his clients.

With Kapor's guidance and experience with graphics programs and Sachs's programming talents, they developed Lotus 1-2-3. Although Kapor is widely given sole credit for the development of 1-2-3, it was actually Sachs who wrote the entire program. Just as VisiCalc had contributed greatly to the success of the Apple II, 1-2-3 made the IBM PC useful to people in business and helped it again its leading edge in the market. Though 1-2-3 was similar to VisiCalc, it was faster, more powerful, easier to learn, and had intergrated graphics and limited database capabilities.