"1-2-3 made a major accomplishment in transitioning the industry," says Bob Frankston, a software developer who, along with original spreadsheet creator Dan Bricklin, developed VisiCalc as the first available spreadsheet program in 1979.

Lotus 1-2-3 was one of the first major products to provide on-screen help and to come with a tutorial on disk. Kapor's focus on end-user satisfaction also prompted him to give users support, and Lotus Development Corp., Cambridge, Mass., was one of the first software companies to have a customer support department.

"One way that I think Mitch has had a pioneering role in the industry, and where I learned an incredible amount, was he thought about end-user software from the standpoint of the end-user experience in a more holistic and integrated way earlier on than anybody I know," says Rob Glaser, chairman and chief executive of Real Networks Inc. "That was embodied by the whole way that 1-2-3 first worked, with millions of small decisions. A lot of great technical work was done by teams that Mitch pulled together."

Kapor's design philosophy and influence span generations of software technology, from 1-2-3 to his founding of On Technology Inc. and its workgroup applications and LAN utilities, to his investments in Uunet Technologies Inc. and PSInet, on up to the streaming audio and video of Real Networks' RealAudio and RealVideo, to the component software schema of Allaire Corp.--two companies of which Kapor is a board member.

"His ability to coach and encourage and catalyze" helped get Real Networks--formerly Progressive Networks--started, Glaser says. "His whole focus was, 'If you can stream audio over the Internet that's just going to be a huge transcendent thing.' " Kapor invested in the company and now owns more than 8 percent of it.

Kapor graduated from Yale University in 1974 and began a sojourn to find himself. This trek included a stint in Europe where he got into transcendental meditation. But he returned to the states and got intensely interested in computers.

In his days as a diskette librarian, Frankston says Kapor was working on a program called Tiny Troll, which was a time series program patterned after a mainframe program--called Troll--at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Tiny Troll was a time series analysis program for the Apple II. "He was already set on creating his own software package," Frankston says.

Meanwhile, Bricklin, known as the father of the spreadsheet, and Frankston started Software Arts Inc. and began selling a heap of VisiCalc software for the Apple II, Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET and Atari 800 platforms. Bricklin and Frankston introduced Kapor to Dan Fylstra, who owned Personal Software, a Silicon Valley software publisher the duo was using to market VisiCalc.

Fylstra coaxed Kapor--who at the time was attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Business in an abortive attempt at getting an M.B.A.--into moving to the West Coast to become product manager for VisiCalc. Around this time, Fylstra also renamed his company VisiCorp to take advantage of the VisiCalc name.

Kapor seized on the opportunity to produce his Tiny Troll application and split it up into a plotting program, which became VisiPlot, and the Tiny Troll portion, which became VisiTrend. Kapor eventually sold these products to VisiCorp for several million dollars.

Though VisiCalc sales were booming--and even driving sales of the Apple II-- Frankston says Kapor became aware of a greater opportunity and "decided that as VisiCorp evolved as more of a venture-backed company, he didn't like it there." He also wanted to come back East. "He said there were no 24-hour science fiction bookstores on the West Coast," Frankston jokes.

So Kapor returned East with the idea for 1-2-3. When he first got back to the Boston area he formed a company called Executive Briefing Systems, which did a presentation program for the Apple II. Meanwhile, VisiCalc continued to do well as Kapor set about founding Lotus in 1982 and launching its flagship product the following year.

It was during that period of the early '80s that Kapor's ease-of-use approach with 1-2-3--and the fact that 1-2-3 ran on the newly introduced IBM PC--put a choke hold on VisiCalc sales, which were still tied to the Apple platform. Software Arts hit hard times and eventually was bought out by Lotus in 1985.

"When Mitch came East we were supportive and friendly," says Frankston. "Even when it was obvious that 1-2-3 was going to kill VisiCalc, we weren't upset at Mitch, because he was doing something reasonable. It was more VisiCorp that set up the circumstances. We were not allowed to evolve, and he was basically told, 'Go away, kid, you can't do that.' The fact that he could seems to have escaped them."

Despite his success at Lotus, the company grew so rapidly and was forced to become such a corporate entity that Kapor began not to like the environment. Kapor left the company in 1986, leaving the helm to Jim Manzi, who had been brought in as a management consultant. Essentially, Kapor built a megacompany out of his idea for an easy-to-use spreadsheet program and then left when things got too corporate.

In a published interview in 1990, Kapor said: "I didn't set out to be Bill Gates--Bill Gates set out to be Bill Gates. In a nutshell, I started this little company called Lotus and made this software product that several million people wound up buying, and this little company turned into this enormous thing with thousands of employees making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And it was awful. It felt awful to me, personally. So I left. I just walked away one day."

David Reed, who spent seven years as vice president of research and development and chief scientist at Lotus, says that after the success of Lotus 1-2-3, Kapor continued to focus on issues of innovation in software design, focusing on users. He launched a number of important ideas at Lotus, including early commitments to develop for graphical user interface environments; an intelligent personal information manager, Lotus Agenda; and groupware, which is now Notes.

"Mitch saw the potential of the ideas in the Internet relatively early, and realized the important issues that it raised," Reed says.

Glaser says, "Mitch was the first person I knew that understood the transcendent impact of the Internet. I mean our company is as early to the Internet party as it is, and as built as fundamentally around the Internet as it is, because of a couple of people and Mitch is one of them. Conversations that I had with Mitch, probably dating back to before '88, were seminal in terms of being an influence to what we did and why we focused our company as fundamentally around the Internet as we have."

Kapor's legacy includes not only technology, but also the social responsibility regarding technology. Kapor, despite continuing to invest in new technology ventures and even starting his own venture firm, Kapor Enterprises Inc., moved beyond the day-to-day business world to key on issues of social responsibility, freedom of speech and protection of rights.

In 1990, Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Grateful Dead lyricist and journalist John Perry Barlow. This followed separate incidents where both had been approached by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents investigating computer crime. The FBI and Secret Service were in the infancy stage of their effort to fight computer crime and, in the views of Kapor and others, essentially bungled some of their early investigations with storm-trooper-like tactics.

Glaser says he can't think of anybody else "who came into the industry as a technological and business leader and integrated the importance of playing those roles with a social conscience more deeply than Mitch." Kapor's 1-2-3 spreadsheet set the tone for business productivity, and Kapor himself set the tone for leadership.