HackADay: “We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets. But we remember a time when there was no Excel. But there were still spreadsheets. How far back do they go? – Definitions = Like many things, exactly what constitutes a spreadsheet can be a little fuzzy. However, in general, a spreadsheet looks like a grid and allows you to type numbers, text, and formulas into the cells. Formulas can refer to other cells in the grid. Nearly all spreadsheets are smart enough to sort formulas based on which ones depend on others…LANPAR was probably the first spreadsheet program, and it was available for the GE400. The name “LANPAR” was LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random, but was also a fusion of the authors’ names. Want to guess the year? 1969. Two Harvard graduates developed it to solve a problem for the Canadian phone company’s budget worksheets, which took six to twenty-four months to change in Fortran. The video below shows a bit of the history behind LANPAR..”