Lotus Development Corporation

Lotus Development Corporation was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1982 by Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs with backing from the venture investor Ben Rosen. It is best known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, released in January 1983, which combined a spreadsheet, graphing and a database and became the leading application of the early IBM PC. In its first year the company had 53 million dollars in sales, making it the world's third-largest microcomputer software company, and it went public in October 1983. Jim Manzi became chief executive in 1986, succeeding Kapor, and led the company until 1995. Its next major product was Lotus Notes in 1989, a groupware and email system developed with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates. IBM bought Lotus in 1995 for 3.5 billion dollars, mainly to acquire Notes, and sold Notes and Domino to HCL in 2018.