Lotus Software
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, Massachusetts, US |
| Products |
Lotus Agenda Lotus Connections Lotus Domino Lotus Domino Web Access Lotus Expeditor Lotus Forms Lotus Magellan Lotus Notes Lotus Notes Traveler Lotus Quickr Lotus Sametime Lotus Symphony Lotus Foundations IBM Lotus Web Content Management |
| Parent | IBM |
| Website | Official website |
Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become widely available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no graphical user interface. Much later, in conjunction with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, Lotus also released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes. IBM purchased the company in 1995 for US$3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important client–server computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products such as IBM's OfficeVision obsolete.
Lotus was founded in 1982 by partners Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs with backing from Ben Rosen. Lotus's first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the Visicalc spreadsheet, and selling all his rights to Visi-Plot and Visi-Trend to Visi-Corp.
Shortly after Kapor left Visi-Corp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby Visi-Calc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product. Lotus released Lotus 1-2-3 on January 26, 1983. The name referred to the three ways the product could be used, as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager. In practice the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available.
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