To aid its growth, in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, Lotus 1-2-3 was the very first computer software to use television consumer advertising. 1-2-3 was originally written by Jonathan Sachs, who had written two spreadsheet programs previously while working at Concentric Data Systems, Inc.
The Lotus Development Corporation was founded by Mitchell Kapor, a friend of the developers of VisiCalc. In spite of these, and others, VisiCalc continued to outsell them all. 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. There were well known problems with VisiCalc, and several competitors appeared to address some of these issues.
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This included the IBM PC when it launched in 1981, where it quickly became another best-seller, with an estimated 300,000 sales in the first six months on the market. VisiCalc's runaway success on the Apple led to direct bug compatible ports to other platforms, including the Atari 8-bit family, Commodore PET and many others. The application was so compelling that there were numerous stories of people buying Apple II machines to run the program. Compared to earlier programs, VisiCalc allowed one to easily construct free-form calculation systems for practically any purpose, the limitations being primarily memory and speed related. VisiCalc was launched in 1979 on the Apple II and immediately became a best-seller. IBM purchased Lotus and continued to sell Lotus offerings, only officially ending sales in 2013. Lotus was passed by Microsoft in the early 1990s and never recovered. 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 graphical-based products, Excel and Word.
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With the acceptance of Windows 3.0, the market for desktop software grew even more. 1-2-3 quickly overtook VisiCalc, as well as Multiplan and SuperCalc, two VisiCalc competitors.ฤก-2-3 was the spreadsheet standard throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, part of a suite of three office automation products that included dBase and WordPerfect, to build a complete business platform.
Lotus' solution was marketed as a three-in-one integrated solution, which handled spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts, hence the name "1-2-3", though how much database capability was debatable given Lotus' sparse memory. 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 in spite of the greatly expanded hardware capabilities. The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, had helped launch the Apple II as one of the earliest personal computers in business use. It was the IBM PC's first killer application, was hugely popular in the 1980s and contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC. Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM).