A: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
In 1982 Mitchell Kapor, previously head of development at Visicorp, and Jonathan Sachs, with backing from Ben Rosen, founded Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kapor, who had been a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, named the company after 'The Lotus Position' or "Padmasana.''
On January 26, 1983 Lotus Development Corporation released Lotus 1-2-3. An integrated spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager, it became the first "killer app" for the PC. In 1983 sales of 1-2-3 reached $54,000,000, making Lotus the largest independent software vendor in the world at that time.