Easy as 1-2-3
by Jon Peltier
Monday, January 26th, 2009
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
From Wired magazine’ This Day in Technology: Jan. 26, 1983: Spreadsheet as Easy as 1-2-3.
Today marks the 25th 26th (Doh!!) anniversary of the release of Lotus 1-2-3, for a time the most popular spreadsheet application. But Lotus was late to the Windows game, sticking to the MS-DOS platform until Microsoft ate its lunch with Windows-based Excel.
1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet program for PCs. Microsoft’s own MultiPlan preceded it by a year, but didn’t stick around for long.
Neither of these was the first spreadsheet software for PCs. Remember Visicalc? It was developed in 1979 and ported to PCs in 1981. A working copy (well, it works within a DOS window) can be downloaded from the site of one of its developers, Dan Bricklin, in all of its 27,520-byte glory, at VisiCalc Executable for the IBM PC.
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Posted: Monday, January 26th, 2009 under General.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from PE
Time: Monday, January 26, 2009, 8:06 pm
Jan. 26, 1983? Wouldn’t that make today the 26th anniversary?
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Monday, January 26, 2009, 8:18 pm
Yeah, my spell-checker is bad at math.
Comment from jenmoocat
Time: Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 12:24 pm
Wow. That picture really brings me back….. My first spreadsheet program!
Comment from Bob
Time: Thursday, January 29, 2009, 10:33 pm
/rnlr was my most often used command.
Giving Range Names…
Bob
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