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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. BEGINNINGS 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 previously 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 free of notable bugs, and was very fast because it was programmed entirely in Assembly Language and bypassed the slower DOS screen input/output functions in favor of writing directly to memory-mapped video display hardware. USER FEATURES 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) contributed 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 graphics on the PC/AT and VGA graphics on the PS/2 . Early versions used the Filename Extension "WKS"http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/wks. In version 2.0, the extension changed first to "WK1"http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/wk1, then "WK2"http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/wk2. This later became "WK3" for version 3.0http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/wk3 and "WK4" for version 4.0http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/wk4. 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 . TECHNICAL FEATURES 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 address for an iterative 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 .
BIOS, directly updating screen memory. The speed of 1-2-3 made it possible to give more responsive performance than much larger minicomputers, or even web-based applications today. RIVALS Lotus 1-2-3 inspired imitators, the first of which was Mosaic Software's " The Twin ," written 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 lawsuits which claimed that the very " Look And Feel " of a program were protected, Lotus sought to ban any program which had a compatible command and menu structure. Program commands had not been considered to be protected 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 case against Mosaic Software. However when they sued Borland over its Quattro Pro spreadsheet, the courts 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 are still present in DOS and Windows and some web applications today, and are still often absent in Mac OS X-based applications, due to the fact that Mac OS was originally (and generally is still) heavily mouse-oriented, rather than keyboard-based. CHALLENGE OF EXCEL The rise of Microsoft Windows in the personal computer market was accompanied by the rise in Microsoft 's competing spreadsheet, Excel , which gradually surpassed 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 turn out 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 functionality and a 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 into a fully-fledged spreadsheet, graph, database and word processor for 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 office software most commonly found on desktops. REFERENCES SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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