Application development tools and technology have come a long way since the late 1970s, when I took my first job out of college in Hewlett-Packard Company’s IT (Information Technology) department. Of course, IT was not the term we used to refer to the discipline back then; our preferred acronym was EDP (Electronic Data Processing).

And maybe that difference between simply “processing” data and delivering “information” was reflected in our development tools. We worked on TTY terminals connected to 16-bit mini-computers over 2400 baud lines. We used simple line editors to make changes to our COBOL programs, and we kept our application data in non-relational hierarchical databases. Debugging was COBOL WRITE statements, and source code control was keeping full copies of every version on tape or in separate directories.

Reports for our applications were typically afterthoughts, and they were done by hand in the same technology we used to develop the base application, i.e., COBOL. We designed them—when we did design—by laying them out in pencil on the report design pads that IBM had developed for RPG and COBOL programmers. Because we created them without much forethought, and because junior programmers like me often got the assignment of coding them, our users often found them inadequate, and the cost of making changes to accommodate their true requirements was high.

But while today’s application developer may scratch his or her head in wonder at the primitive tools and technologies we employed in building our base applications in the late 1970s, he or she may not find my description of our approach to report development so very unfamiliar.