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Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) is a software company with headquarters in Westford, 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. Such a useful tool certainly helped to spread the adoption of the PC, both for administrative and scientific applications. 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 $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 like IBM's OfficeVision obsolete.
Source: Wikipedia, accessed 2/12/10.
