


The IBM PC's Killer Apps: Where Are They Now?

Nothing gold can stay. On the IBM PC's 40th anniversary, we look at the software that made the PC platform popular—and see whether they've survived to the present.

When the IBM PC first hit the market in 1981, it didn't have a lot of software. In PC Magazine's second issue, we looked at IBM's "Personal Computer Software Publishing Department"—an arm of the company looking for coders to add to a relatively thin selection of programs in a business world then-dominated by the CP/M operating system.

That all changed, of course. The IBM PC and its DOS operating system became the business standard as the 1980s went on. Looking at the first few years of PC Magazine, we saw lots of references to the programs below. While most of them weren't originally written for the PC, their presence early in the PC's life made the platform legitimate and important. Here's how to experience some of the early software that made the PC great.


VisiCalc was the first commercially available spreadsheet software.

The first killer apps for the IBM PC didn't appear first on the IBM PC. In general, they were ports of apps on other computing platforms. What IBM brought to the table was its reputation in the business world, and the IBM-compatible universe took off from there.

VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet—yes, someone had to be the first—debuted in 1979 on the Apple II, and much of the initial 1981 IBM PC announcement featured VisiCalc doing things. While the application was quickly eclipsed by more powerful competitors like Microsoft Multiplan and Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc was where it all started.

Where Is It Now? The superior Lotus 1-2-3 killed VisiCalc. Lotus bought the software's maker in 1985 and ended its run. Spreadsheets, of course, live on. Can you imagine a life without them?

Try VisiCalc online at PCJS.org.


WordStar relied on complex control-key combinations.

"WordStar is to word processing what VisiCalc is to spreadsheet programs—very popular," our reviewer said in PC Magazine's first issue. As the first popular word processor to show where line and page breaks would fall in a printed document, WordStar had been the word-processing standard on business computing platforms since 1978, so many bosses found it worth the $495 (that's, gulp, $1,480 in 2021 dollars) to comport with the industry standard.

WordStar was also a huge, awkward, and arcane pain, hogging limited RAM and relying on complex control-key commands. The IBM PC's function keys made WordStar easier to use (as the table from PC Magazine above shows), but it was ripe for disruption as more user-friendly interfaces became possible.

Where Is It Now? By the mid-1980s, WordStar had faded in favor of two other giants: WordPerfect and Microsoft Word. Both were part of larger office suites from companies that had better service and support, and both were quicker to iterate new features. WordStar puttered along until 1994 and vanished.

Try WordStar online at PCJS.org.

Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 took spreadsheets to the next level.

If VisiCalc proved PCs were ready for business, Lotus 1-2-3 made them mainstream. Arriving in 1983, 1-2-3 integrated database functionality and charts, and could be sold in a package with Lotus' dBase database software and WordPerfect word processor. For a while in the 1980s, these names were synonymous with their functions.

Software was much more expensive in the early days of PCs. In our January 1985 issue, an ad shows Lotus 1-2-3 for $295—that's $744 in today's dollars. Currently, a one-time purchase of Microsoft Office costs $249.99.

Where Is It Now? Lotus 1-2-3 failed to make the transition from DOS to Windows well, and its last version was issued in 2002. Microsoft Excel has largely taken its place.

Try Lotus 1-2-3 online at PCJS.org.

Microsoft BASIC

BASIC code
BASIC was the common language of amateur programmers throughout the '80s.

Coding was an even bigger part of the 1980s computing experience than it is today. With retail software very expensive and no internet out there, magazines were full of "type-it-yourself" programs. Anyone with half a mind toward coding tried to put together custom solutions for their home or business. BASIC helped make that happen. While Pascal was more popular for professional coders and COBOL was the business standard language, BASIC was easy to learn and easy to use, and it's how most of the coders of the 1980s cut their teeth.

Where Is It Now? It still lives! Sort of. Microsoft Visual Basic is still included with every copy of Windows and is currently in its sixteenth iteration. It doesn't have a lot of resemblance to the original Microsoft BASIC anymore, as it's now an object-oriented language reliant on a complex, system-wide framework. But if you gave Visual Basic a 23andMe swab, it would definitely come up with Microsoft BASIC in its ancestry.

Run Microsoft BASIC at PCJS.org.

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Flight Simulator
Flight Simulator was radical for its graphical realism. You're supposedly looking at Chicago.

There weren't many games available for the IBM PC in 1981. In our first issue, author Carl Warren said "this computer, more so than others, is targeted as a productivity machine for the family and manager of today, rather than as a sophisticated device to garner points by 'chomping' gumdrops or cookies."

Microsoft's Flight Simulator, released in 1982, was the IBM game to beat. We reviewed it in November 1982, and called it "an extraordinarily realistic simulation of the flight of a single-engine light aircraft." Underlying the achievement was a desire to show off IBM's 4.77MHz Intel 8088 processor. The processor in the PC was four times as fast as the one in the Apple II and more than twice as fast as the one in the TRS-80, and Flight Sim showed how the PC could crunch numbers in real time that the other platforms couldn't.

Where Is It Now? Still flying! The 2020 version of Flight Simulator was an absolute tour de force and one of our favorite apps of last year. In a year when many of us were trapped inside, Flight Simulator used Bing satellite imagery and Azure cloud computing to let you roam a photorealistic rendering of the entire world while operating also-realistically performing aircraft.

Play Flight Simulator online at PCJS.org.

Microsoft Adventure

Adventure started the entire genre of fantasy gaming.

Adventure was one of the first two Microsoft applications released for the PC (the other one was Typing Tutor.) A port of the 1970s classic Colossal Cave Adventure, it established the genre and concept of "being in a fantasy world on your PC." Text adventures, or interactive fiction, were a huge industry in the 1980s, before computers could draw realistic images. Adventure was also famous for being very close to public domain; there were many versions and riffs on the theme, by different writers and programmers, for different systems.

Where Is It Now? This is the hardest question in this story; to some extent, Adventure is everywhere. It has been the foundation of the entire concept of online dungeon-crawling. Every time you enter a dark tunnel or hit an orc with an axe, it owes something to Adventure.

Play Adventure online at PCJS.org.

About Sascha Segan