Easy as 1-2-3

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.