Jonathan Sachs (born June 25, 1947) is a programmer who co-founded

Lotus Development Corporation Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

with

Mitch Kapor Mitchell David Kapor ( ; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in devel ...

in 1982 and created the first version of the

Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatible ...

spreadsheet program. Sachs left Lotus in 1985 to develop photo-editing software for his own

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Greater Boston, Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most ...

based company, Digital Light & Color, which has been distributing its product, Picture Window, since 1994. Sachs was born in

Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

and received his BS in math from MIT in 1970. He later worked at MIT for several years, where he wrote the STOIC language, at

Data General Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicompu ...

, and at Concentric Data Systems.Oral history interview with Jonathan Sachs

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota. 1-2-3 was known for its speed and efficiency. The original program was implemented in

Intel 8088 The Intel 8088 ("''eighty-eighty-eight''", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on June 1, 1979, the 8088 has an eight-bit external Bus (computing), data bus instead of the 16-bit computing, 16-bit bus of ...

assembly language, rather than a higher level language such as C. It was also nearly bug-free, and introduced the letter hierarchical menus still used in Windows applications. Later versions of 1-2-3 were implemented in C, becoming much larger and more complex.

References

External links

1-2-3 Hits the Ground Running

Digital Light & Color
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sachs, Jonathan 1947 births Living people American computer businesspeople Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni

See also

References

External links