A look back: LANPAR, the first spreadsheet

Summary

Many people think of VisiCalc as the first spreadsheet, and while VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet on the desktop, it’s not actually the first spreadsheet.Ten years before VisiCalc, two engineers at Bell Canada came up with a pretty neat idea. At the time, organizational budgets were created using a program that ran on a mainframe system. If a manager wanted to make a change to the budget model, that might take programmers months to create an updated version.Rene Pardo and Remy Landau discussed the problem and asked “what if the managers could make their own budget forms as they would normally write them?” And with that, a new idea was created: the spreadsheet program.The new spreadsheet was called LANPAR, for “LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random” (but really it was a mash-up of their last names: LANdau and PARdo).A grid of boxesLANPAR used a grid of cells, called “boxes.” Each box was referenced by a row and column: the box in the upper left corner was box 101 (think of this box address as row 1 and column 01), the box on row 1 and column 99 was box 199, and the box on row 999 and column 1 was box 99901. LANPAR supported up to 999 rows and 99 columns.101102103104201202203204301302303304401402403404The patent application (filed in 1970, granted in 1983, now expired) highlights how the first LANPAR worked: users would enter box data into a file using plain text. Each row started on a new line, and boxes were separated by semicolons. The boxes could contain one of three kinds of values:INPUT to prompt the user for a valueK to create a numerical constant, such as K3.14 for the value 3.14a calculation that references only other boxes, using addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*), division (/) and exponentiation (^)As a simple example, a user might tally a list of numbers from 1 to 4 by writing the numbers on one line as boxes 101 to 104, and calculation on the next line in box 201:K1 ; K2 ; K3 ; K4 101 + 102 + 103 + 104To calculate an average of these...