As he walked onto the floor of Comdex/Fall in 1982, Jonathan Sachs, a reticent software programmer for a tiny start-up, worried that the application he and his partner had spent almost a year creating would be a flop.

It was too difficult for its intended audience, he thought, and would scare users away. With questions in his mind and an updated resumŽ in hand, Sachs took his baby to the crowds on the Las Vegas show floor. Little did he know his creation would change the computer industry forever.

"It hit the ground running," the now-51-year-old Sachs said. And Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet application that was the brainchild of Sachs and legendary Lotus Development Corp. founder Mitch Kapor, has not stopped. Sachs and Kapor saw their contribution to the PC revolution unfold before their eyes on that November day. Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus' first application, became the first "killer app" for the PC and changed the lives of millions, including those of Kapor and Sachs.

As it turned out, Sachs had no need to worry whether his and Kapor's creation would succeed. Before the show ended, tiny Lotus, then a company of only 30 people or so, was millions of dollars richer.

"During that Comdex, we booked about $3 million in orders before it ever came out," Sachs said. And it only got better from there. Lotus released 1-2-3 on Jan. 26, 1983. By that spring, 1-2-3 was atop distributor Softsel Computer Products Inc.'s best-seller list and it stayed as No. 1 on the list for two consecutive years. In its first year alone, the application vaulted Lotus into the big time with sales of $53 million. The company sold more than 60,000 copies in the first month of availability.

On one level, Sachs and Kapor had created a lightning-fast--by 1982 standards--business application that significantly eased the lives of accountants and other professionals who frequently pored over complex calculations. But 1-2-3 would really come to mean much more to the industry.

Its popularity would launch IBM Corp.'s fledgling personal computer, a device that had lacked the kind of practical application it needed to take off.

1-2-3 was the answer and, eventually, it and the applications that followed would put a PC on top of every desk in the business world.

"It was pretty amazing because a factor of five more PCs got sold once that software was available," Sachs said. "It was very closely tuned to the original IBM PC and pretty much used all of its features."

But, like so many revolutions, 1-2-3 had humble beginnings. In 1982, Kapor founded a company called Micro Finance Systems in his basement. He enlisted a few programmers--two of whom were teenagers--and began funding the company with a revenue stream he accumulated from sales of his additions to VisiCalc, the original electronic spreadsheet created in 1979 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology buddies Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.

Sachs, meanwhile, had left a job as a programmer at Data General Corp. to form a consulting company with his former boss. Data General approached the consulting start-up about building a spreadsheet on contract. When Sachs and his partner parted ways, Sachs began to talk with Kapor about creating a spreadsheet that would surpass the functionality and popularity of VisiCalc.

"Kapor had written add-ons for VisiCalc," Sachs said. "They had sold thousands of units, which in those days was a lot. My partner and I had written a program for minicomputers, and we sold a total of one. I said, 'I'll just do whatever this guy says because he has an understanding of what people will buy.' By the same token, he had all these ideas but he didn't have any way to realize them. We both sort of used each other."

The pair chose to develop 1-2-3 the hard way. Instead of using the Pascal programming language-- which a competitor had used in an application called Context MBA--Kapor and Sachs decided to write in assembly language. That choice made for a slow, tedious development process--but it also made all the difference in the finished product, which was tremendously faster than Context MBA and VisiCalc.

"From a programmer's standpoint, it was a mind-boggling challenge to write that much code in assembly language that fast and get it to be really solid," said Sachs.

Jeffrey Tarter, industry analyst and publisher of Watertown, Mass.-based Softletter, said it was the speed that counted. "The product wasn't substantially different than things with $1 million budgets. It just worked faster."

But getting it to work faster was a slow process. Kapor and Sachs spent 10 months developing the project. The key, Sachs said, was that 1-2-3 was based on an existing prototype he and Kapor had previously created. Instead of setting out with a grand concept to include a boatload of features, Sachs and Kapor simply added features to a core product. At every stage of development, a working tool existed. As Kapor and Sachs added feature after feature, they distinguished 1-2-3 from any other spreadsheet, including VisiCalc.

"It wasn't like we sat down and designed everything and then built it. There was no point where we sat in a room and drew this thing on a whiteboard that said: spreadsheet, graphing, database, macro language," Sachs said.

It was finally decided that database and graphing capabilities would be key.

Sachs globbed them on, scrapping plans for a word processor, which he says would have been too time-consuming and difficult to develop and would have been of little advantage to users.

Kapor preannounced 1-2-3 about five months before its debut and Sachs took three months to work the kinks out of the application, and then he took it to Vegas. A large beta program and a well-timed article in The Wall Street Journal had set the floor abuzz, but neither Kapor nor Sachs could have anticipated the reaction 1-2-3 received.

"After Comdex, everyone was infused with energy," Sachs said. "It was like night and day."

After the $3 million in orders at Comdex, after the meteoric rise of the software in its first year, and after Kapor and Sachs got a chance to catch their collective breath, little Lotus began to grow up. Quickly. And demand for 1-2-3 was overwhelming.

But immediately, Lotus faced unforeseen challenges. There were shortages of all kinds--even the D-shaped rings that held together technical manuals were in short supply. The growth took its toll on Lotus' original cast.

"You're throwing people to the sharks--you've got to swim really fast or fall by the wayside," Sachs said.

Obviously, Cambridge, Mass.-based Lotus, now a subsidiary of IBM, survived and prospered, and 1-2-3 is still a name experienced techies and new users alike recognize. 1-2-3 is now part of SmartSuite, Lotus' productivity suite offering, and Lotus' current chief executive, Jeff Papows, said it still catches eyes. "We have a lot of brand value still with 1-2-3," Papows said.

But as 1-2-3 evolved and Lotus changed, the spreadsheet's creators drifted from the company. Kapor served as chief executive until 1986 and left Lotus in 1987. Later, he served as chief executive of On Technology, a workgroup-software developer. Kapor was inducted into CRN's Industry Hall of Fame last year.

Sachs, meanwhile, left Lotus in 1985, less than three years after that fateful day in Las Vegas. Semi-retired, he now develops photo-editing software for his own company, Digital Light and Color. His application, called PictureWindow, is targeted at hobbyist photographers.

Their work remains some of the most important and well-chronicled in the still-short history of high tech. Sachs said he doubts there will ever be another application with the immediate impact of 1-2-3.

He may be right.