
With LANPAR, spreadsheets could perform omnidirectional calculations and were no longer limited to left-to-right or top-to-bottom calculations. Pardo and Remy Landau – allowed spreadsheets to perform cell-level references and calculations, as well as forward referencing and natural order calculation. LANPAR – based on an algorithm developed by Rene K. In 1969, almost a decade after the invention of the BSRG, spreadsheets’ calculation abilities took a major leap forward with the invention of the “LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random” software, or LANPAR. In 1962, the BSRG was implemented in an IBM computer as Business Computer Language (BCL), bringing spreadsheets to a wider audience, including students at universities with timesharing computers.
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Read on as we take a not-so-brief ~7000 year journey through the evolution of spreadsheets and learn how they went from a pre-modern accounting method to an essential software tool used by hundreds of millions of people every month.Īn IBM 1130, the first computer on which BSRG was implemented (Image: Martin Skøtt, via Wikimedia)

These familiar digital spreadsheets are the conclusion of thousands of years of evolution in record keeping, finance, accounting, mathematics, and computer science. Whether you use Google Sheets, Excel,, a physical ledger book, or something else, this basic system is what makes a spreadsheet a spreadsheet.

In fact, the history of spreadsheets is so long that it dates back as far as 3200 BC.Īt its core, the spreadsheet is the same for the personal budgeter as it is for the financial modeler or project manager: a table consisting of cells with different values, all organized in a system of rows and columns. But their analog predecessors – pre-modern accounting methods, paper bookkeeping, early mainframe-based calculations, and more – have a history that’s as extensive as it is fascinating. Digital spreadsheets as we know them today have only existed since the late 1970s.
