Trainboy85 wrote:
This is a something i need to know for an IT Assignment and this is
that only
thing i don't know.

When I graduated from college in 1982, my first job was with a software
company that made many products, but the one I worked with was a
"financial modeling, statistical analysis, graphics, what-if analysis"
tool. This was before the PC existed per se. The type of packages were
classified as "Decision Support Systems". Packages such as FOCUS,
SystemW, IFPS, EMPIRE, and SAS were the tools available. These were
"english-like" procedural programming tools that would be compiled into
Fortran, etc for execution. These tools ran on the "mainframe" and
"midrange" hardware platforms being the predominate hardware platforms
in the "old days"...Then the PC...Bill Gates, Lotus,...came on
after...The DSS product I supported called EMPIRE had a cobol like
structure, but had a place to define columns, rows, and
constants...sounds like "spreadsheets"...they were the predecessors to
it I guess...just to complete your history lesson...