Mitch Kapor founded...
Mitch Kapor founded Lotus Development with
Jonathan Sachs in 1982. Their spreadsheet
software, Lotus 1-2-3, quickly surpassed
VisiCalc to become the new industry standard.
VisiCalc had been the original “killer app”
for personal computers. Kapor was a VisiCalc
product manager at Personal Software when
he wrote VisiPlot and VisiTrend, companion
products to VisiCalc. He left to found Lotus
just as legal conflicts were distracting
VisiCalc’s developers, and the arrival of the
IBM PC opened a window of opportunity for a
better spreadsheet. Lotus 1-2-3 could handle
larger spreadsheets and added integrated charting, plotting, and database
capabilities. It became the killer app killer.
Lotus went public in 1983. Kapor served as president and CEO from 1982 to
1986, and as a director until 1987. IBM acquired Lotus in 1995 for $3.5 billion.
Kapor cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990 and
now leads the Open Source Applications Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes
the development and adoption of open source software.
Livingston: How did Lotus get started?
Kapor: I bought an Apple II in the summer of 1978 because I had become
obsessed with personal computers and just had to have one. I didn’t know what
I wanted to do. I very quickly and fortunately started generating some consulting
income, writing programs for individuals who had bought them, like an
ophthalmologist who wanted to use it in his practice and an investment analyst
who wanted to look at stock market data. And I met other people in those days
that had Apple IIs, because it was very much a hobby phenomenon. Several of
us started an Apple II user group called New England Apple Tree.
One of those people was Eric Rosenfeld, who was a graduate student in
finance at MIT. As a favor to him, and because it was kind of a challenge, I
helped write a statistics routine that ran on the Apple II that he could use to
analyze data in his dissertation. It took me a weekend. He actually had to
explain the math to me; once he explained it, I understood the math.
Afterwards, we kind of realized, hey, this might actually be useful to other
people if we built a statistics and graphics product on the Apple II. It was called
Tiny Troll after something called TROLL, which was a time-sharing thing
at MIT.
At the same time, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were developing
VisiCalc, also in Cambridge, and when it came out, it set the world on its ear. It
was far and away the most useful piece of software ever done for a personal
| ← people had to | computer. It was → |