1-2-3, Release 1A
What was New in this Release

See the Box

See the Disks

1-2-3 Release 1A was Barry Spencer's first project at Lotus. He wrote the software for the supported printers and plotters ...  and there were 40 to 50 of them. Below he shares with us the difference between Release 1.0 and 1A:

1-2-3 1a differed in several ways. Here is what I remember.
 
Device support / driverization. Lotus 1-2-3 release 1.0 supported only 1 or 2 printers (Epson, I believe) and didn't run on any computer but the original IBM PC.   
 
Release 1a had a new "driver architecture" - which allowed 1-2-3 to be ported to other machines - like the Compaq, the Dynalogic Hyperion, a first-of-it's kind notebook computer called the "Grid" (which had a 3x7 font), a computer by "Victor Comuting" (a relic), and the DEC Rainbow as well. There are one or two others that I am forgetting.
 
1-2-3 1a also had support for a wide of variety of printers and plotters. I know, because I wrote the software for ALL of them. I think there was somewhere on the order of 40 to 50 different plotters and printers supported.
 
1-2-3 1a had program called "PrintGraph" which was either not included, or had very limited capabilities in release 1.0. 1a also had a file manager, and a couple other cool utilities.
 
A woman named Mary Lynn Davis created some super-cool fonts for PrintGraph.
 
1-2-3 1a had Macros - where I don't think that release 1.0 had Macros. If it did, the macros were very limited.
 
Anyhow, I think the overall theme for the 1a release was broadening the reach of the product by supporting other computers and peripherals.