Friday, January 26th. On this date 35 years ago, the infant personal computer was empowered to become something much greater than a glorified word processor with the release of the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3. The popular program drew acclaim as the first PC “killer application.” Finance and accounting workers were thus freed from hunching over ledger books and switched to hunching before a computer screen. The name “1-2-3” stemmed from the product’s integration of three main capabilities — spreadsheet, charting and graphing, and rudimentary database operations. It could also perform some word processing functions. Today there are about 9,600 software publishers in America, employing 470,000 people in the more than $170 billion per year business.
You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online here.
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