Lotus 1-2-3
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Software & Languages
Mitch Kapor developed Lotus 1-2-3, writing the software directly into the
video system of the IBM PC. By bypassing DOS, it ran much faster than its
competitors. Along with the immense popularity of the IBM's computer, Lotus
owed much of its success to its working combination of spreadsheet capabilities
with graphics and data retrieval capabilities.
Kapor, who received his bachelor's degree in an individually designed
cybernetics major from Yale University in 1971, started Lotus Development Corp.
to market his spreadsheet and served as its president and CEO from 1982 to
1986. He also has worked to develop policies that maximize openness and
competitiveness in the computer industry.
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People & Pop Culture
Time magazine altered its annual tradition of naming a "Man of the
Year," choosing instead to name the computer its "Machine of the
Year." In introducing the theme, Time publisher John A. Meyers wrote,
"Several human candidate might have represented 1982, but none
symbolized the past year more richly, or will be viewed by history as more
significant, than a machine: the computer."
His magazine, he explained, has chronicled the change in public opinion with
regard to computers. A senior writer contributed: "Computers were
once regarded as distant, ominous abstractions, like Big Brother. In 1982,
they truly became personalized, brought down to scale, so that people could
hold, prod and play with them." At Time, the main writer on the
project completed his work on a typewriter, but Meyers noted that the
magazine's newsroom would upgrade to word processors within a year.
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People & Pop Culture
The use of computer-generated graphics in movies took a step forward with
Disney's release of "Tron." One of the first movies to use such
graphics, the plot of "Tron" also featured computers - it followed
the adventures of a hacker split into molecules and transported inside a
computer. Computer animation, done by III, Abel, MAGI, and Digital Effects,
accounted for about 30 minutes of the film.
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Computers
The Cray XMP, first produced in this year, almost doubled the operating speed
of competing machines with a parallel processing system that ran at 420 million
floating-point operations per second, or megaflops. Arranging two Crays to
work together on different parts of the same problem achieved the faster speed. Defense and scientific research institutes also heavily used Crays.
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