Lotus 123 - put the business in personal computers

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Wed, 12/20/2006 - 7:08pm.

The 12th top technology is Lotus 123. Lotus 123 is a spreadsheet product released by Lotus. It wasn't the first spreadsheet for the IBM PC or even the first spreadsheet in existence, but it was the one that was the most popular.

You could tell someone used Lotus 123 because they spoke with SLASH "/" and then a command. For instance, /FS was for file save.

The real power of Lotus 123 came from that command structure. It was easy to standardize and someone could pick up how to use it very easily.

I first became acquainted with Lotus 123 when I developed marketing plans for software companies. I was young, very young, and needed to create the graphs and the data accompanying them. I was using a monochrome PC at the time and it was a whole new world to me. What took hours in the past took minutes.

Lotus 123 grew faster than a steroids boosted baby in corporate America. It brought the power of data analysis to individual workgroups, which meant more and more PCs were installed.