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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. 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.

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1. Lotus Notes can be a stand-alone data repository, a front-end to numerous other data repositories, or many things in-between. What is a Notes Database A Lotus Notes database generally has a file extension of '.nsf'.
2. A: Lotus 123 was a software title that specialized in spreadsheet and database productivity. At one time, IBM actually controlled development and support for it, and the title proved so popular.

The computer program Lotus 123 was created by Lotus Software in 1983. Lotus is now owned by IBM and is no longer made.

1-2-3 was released on January 26, 1983 and immediately overtook Visicalc in sales. 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 cleanly programmed and relatively bug-free, as well as speed gained from being written completely in x86 assembly language (this remained the case for all versions until 4.0 when Lotus switched to C) and wrote directly to video memory rather than use the slow DOS and/or BIOS text output functions.

This reliance on the specific hardware of the IBM PC led to 1-2-3 being utilized as one of the two litmus test applications for true 100% compatibility when PC clones started to appear in the early- to mid- 80s. 1-2-3 was used to test general application compatibility, with Microsoft Flight Simulator being used to test graphics compatibility. Because spreadsheets use large amounts of memory, 123 spurred the drive for greater RAM capacities in PCs and especially the event of “expanded memory” which allowed greater than 640k to be accessed.

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Lotus 123 became the first “killer app” for PC compatibles, especially as it was available exclusively on that platform and no other computers. Many thousands of PCs were sold solely for the purpose of running 123, and its near-monopoly of the spreadsheet market remained unchallenged for a decade.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app that made the IBM PC the standard for computers. It wasn’t the first spreadsheet, but it ran on a computer that could easily address more than 64K of memory, it was fast, and relatively bug free. So it was super successful. Today we know it as the thing people used before Excel. So what were the advantages and disadvantages of Lotus 1-2-3?

Advantages of Lotus 1-2-3

In its heyday, Lotus 1-2-3 was fast. It ran on IBM PCs and it pushed their limits. If you knew how to use Visicalc, you could move to 1-2-3 pretty easily, and the PCs were quicker than the 8-bit Apples that ran Visicalc. Aside from being a spreadsheet, it had built in graphing, and you could use it as a rudimentary database. There wasn’t much that Excel did that 1-2-3 didn’t, but 1-2-3 was doing it before Windows existed.

In the 1980s, 1-2-3 was the reason a lot of people bought IBM-compatible PCs. They’d go buy the cheapest clone they could find, like a Leading Edge Model D or something similar, then they’d pay a few hundred dollars for a copy of 1-2-3. Or they’d buy the PC and pirate 1-2-3.

In those early days, Lotus drove the industry. When 640K of memory was no longer enough, Lotus helped invent a workaround that allowed PCs to use more. Microsoft called it expanded memory or EMS, but most of the industry called it LIM, for Lotus-Intel-Microsoft, the three companies who collaborated on it. A lot of DOS games used it too, but originally it existed to give Lotus 1-2-3 more memory so it could crunch bigger spreadsheets.

Lotus made a lot of products, but 1-2-3 was its biggest product in the early days. When someone said they knew “Lotus,” they were referring to 1-2-3.

Enter the Excel juggernaut

There’s just no way around it. Lotus frittered away its market leadership. When the Mac came out, Lotus built a Microsoft Works-like integrated package for it that combined a so-so word processor, a so-so spreadsheet, and a so-so database. They called it Jazz and expected it to become a killer app. It flopped. Meanwhile, there was Microsoft. Microsoft had an also-ran spreadsheet called Multiplan that ran on PCs. They decided to make a full-featured, easy-to-use spreadsheet on the Mac and called it Excel. People skipped Jazz and flocked to Excel.

Then, in the second half of the 1980s, Microsoft released this thing called Windows. Nobody wanted it because it was slow and crashed a lot. But they wrote a version of Excel for Windows too. Lotus built a souped-up 1-2-3 for an IBM operating system called OS/2 that about twelve people liked. I was one of them. They ignored Windows. In 1990 when Microsoft finally got Windows to a point where you could run it for four hours without it crashing, Excel was one of the few native programs you could run on it. It was just as easy to use as it was on the Mac, and you could run it on a $995 286 clone you bought at the nearest consumer electronics store.

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The combination of ubiquitous cheap PCs bundled with Windows and Mac-like software to run on it proved unstoppable.

Disadvantages of Lotus 1-2-3

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There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with Lotus 1-2-3 in 1990, except it ran on DOS. Excel on Windows was easier to use. 1-2-3 had a complex menu structure while Excel had a toolbar with nifty icons for the most commonly used functions. If you’d never used Lotus 1-2-3 before, you had to buy a book to learn it. You could fumble your way through Excel without a book.

Lotus eventually wrote a version of 1-2-3 for Windows and it worked fine, but Excel was the standard by then. If you used DOS, you ran Lotus. If you used Windows, you ran Excel. The exception was if you were a holdout and you had been running 1-2-3 on DOS for years. Then you might opt for 1-2-3 for Windows. But outside of the accounting department, you didn’t find very many of those people.

Then, in 1995, along came Windows 95, a 32-bit Windows for mainstream computing. Microsoft released a native 32-bit version of Excel the very same day. It took Lotus about two years to release a 32-bit version of 1-2-3. The 16-bit version of 1-2-3 was a little bit faster than those early 32-bit versions of Excel, but Excel was more stable and you could load much bigger spreadsheets on it. And by the time Lotus shipped its first 32-bit version of 1-2-3, it was competing with Microsoft’s second 32-bit version of Excel.

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IBM bought Lotus in 1998, and updated 1-2-3 a few times, but gave up on releasing new versions in 2002. They sold the old version to die-hards until 2013, but it was a niche product by then.

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There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with 1-2-3 on Windows except it was always a couple of years behind Microsoft. And people weren’t going to wait for Lotus to catch up.