<p>A Lotus 1-2-3 screenshot, from back in the golden age of DOS software</p><p>Wolfgang Gruener of Tom's Hardware alerted me to a bit of news that, while minor, has left me in a wistful mood. IBM is planning to remove the Lotus branding from its Notes and Domino workgroup products. It's the apparent end of Lotus, a brand which was launched in 1982 with the 1-2-3 spreadsheet, the most important productivity application of its era.</p><p>It's tough to remember now, but in the period before Microsoft Office came along, it was Lotus, not Microsoft, that was synonymous with office software. Lotus Development Corporation, which Mitch Kapor founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had a ginormous cash cow in 1-2-3, a product which was so popular that companies bought fleets of IBM PCs just to run it.</p><p>Lotus cranked out (and sometimes acquired) an array of apps: Approach, cc:Mail, Hal, Improv, Jazz, Manuscript, Magellan, Organizer, Symphony and many more. They weren't always successful in fact, many of them came and went rather quickly but the company had a really good track record when it came to releasing stuff that was inventive and interesting.</p><p><a href="http://techland.time.com/2012/11/20/lotus-farewell-to-a-once-great-tech-brand/">Keep reading...</a></p>