On this date 33 years ago, the infant personal computer was empowered to become something much greater than a glorified word processor with the release of the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3. The popular program drew acclaim as the first PC “killer application.” Finance and accounting workers were thus freed from hunching over ledger books and switched to hunching before a computer screen. The name “1-2-3” stemmed from the product’s integration of three main capabilities — spreadsheet, charting and graphing, and rudimentary database operations. Today there are over 8,900 software publishers in the U.S., employing almost 430,000 people in the $170 billion per year business. You can find more statistics on communities across the country by downloading the Census Bureau’s “dwellr” mobile application at <www.census.gov/mobile>.