Jonathan Sachs
Jonathan Sachs (b. June 25, 1947) is a programmer who co-founded Lotus Development Corporation with Mitch Kapor in 1982 and created the first version of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program.
Life
Sachs was born in Baltimore, Maryland 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, and at Concentric Data Systems.
1-2-3 was notable for its speed and efficiency. The original program was implemented in the assembly language of the PC (Intel 8088), as opposed to 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 would be implemented in C and were much larger and more complex.
Sachs left Lotus in 1985 and now develops photo-editing software for his own Cambridge, Massachusetts based company, Digital Light & Color, which has been distributing its product, Picture Window, since 1994.
