[JimSEA]

I would have to say that, for its day, Lotus 123 brought the most office applications and made the PC a "have to have" piece of equipment. I used to for cost modeling for everything from mine planning to labor contract modeling. I knew nothing about computers when I went on salary in 1980 and Lotus literally saved my job.

[George W. Bush]

I would have to say that, for its day, Lotus 123 brought the most office applications and made the PC a "have to have" piece of equipment.

Actually, the real pioneering product was Visicalc. Microsoft's contender, Multiplan, was also a strong offering.

In corporate America, IBM's DisplayWriter with its daisy-wheel printers was very strong. But we started to see a transformation from typing/word processing pools to PC's on every desktop with Wordstar and, shortly, the ascendance of WordPerfect.

Not long after, Microsoft recognized the market's direction and captured it with the first serious versions of Microsoft Word on and Excel on Windows 3.1. Today, the real strength and stranglehold on corporate America derives from their understandable addiction to Outlook, one of the truly outstanding Microsoft offerings (warts and all).

[gitmo]

Visicalc

[Still Thinking]

I used to work with a guy who used nothing but Lotus. It was his spreadsheet, payroll program, database, and even his word processor!