[4] Lotus was founded in 1982 by partners Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs with backing from Ben Rosen.

[5] By the end of that year the company offered Executive Briefing System, presentation software for the Apple II.

Shortly after Kapor left VisiCorp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program.

Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby VisiCalc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a superior product.

In 1982, Jim Manzi — a graduate of Colgate University and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy — came to Lotus as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company and became an employee four months later.

[citation needed] As the popularity of the personal computer grew, Lotus quickly came to dominate the spreadsheet market.

[12] In this period, Manuscript, a word processor, Lotus Agenda, an innovative personal information manager (PIM) which flopped, and Improv, a ground-breaking modeling package (and spreadsheet) for the NeXT platform, were released.

This led Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, to found the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) and hold protests outside Lotus Development offices.

As a result of this early speculative move, Lotus gained significant experience in network-based communications years before other competitors in the PC world had even started thinking about networked computing or the Internet.

Jim Manzi looked for potential white knights and forced IBM to increase its bid to $64.50 per share for a $3.5 billion buyout of Lotus in July 1995.

[21] On October 11, 1995, Manzi announced his resignation from what had become the Lotus Development division of IBM; he left with stock worth $78 million.

As she continued to build her organization and play a central role with senior management, she eventually hired Freada Klein as the first director of employee relations.

To the surprise of many employees and journalists, IBM initially adopted a very hands-off, laissez-faire attitude toward its new acquisition.