Thursday, January 26 — On this date 34 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 nearly 9,200 software publishers in the U.S., employing 442,000 people in the $171 billion per year business.
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