Comments on: Prerelational financial app software vendors 1 — a quick overview http://www.softwarememories.com/2006/02/13/prerelational-financial-app-software-vendors-1-a-quick-overview/ History of software, by somebody who lived it Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:36:06 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: What’s NetSuite up to? http://www.softwarememories.com/2006/02/13/prerelational-financial-app-software-vendors-1-a-quick-overview/#comment-46010 What’s NetSuite up to? Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:21:02 +0000 http://www.softwarememories.com/?p=12#comment-46010 [...] a big claim but not one that is as outlandish as it sounds. Anyone remember the days when McCormack and Dodge ruled the roost? It was SAP that took them out through a technology change we call client/server. SaaS/cloud is [...] [...] a big claim but not one that is as outlandish as it sounds. Anyone remember the days when McCormack and Dodge ruled the roost? It was SAP that took them out through a technology change we call client/server. SaaS/cloud is [...]

]]> By: Jay Wortman http://www.softwarememories.com/2006/02/13/prerelational-financial-app-software-vendors-1-a-quick-overview/#comment-31989 Jay Wortman Sat, 04 Oct 2008 22:32:18 +0000 http://www.softwarememories.com/?p=12#comment-31989 A couple points on this. This is from the software industry in 1983-84 when I worked with accounting/financial software as technical rep and sales support. I found in some old brochures that McCormack & Dodge (M&D) was a company of Dun & Bradstreet. When I was working for a sales company in Paris, we were flogging accounting software from Software International (SI). We had two competitors: M&D and MSA. SI software ran on IBM CMS, IBM AS/400(??), DEC VAX, Prime and a few others As well, I worked with a Financial Planning package called Interactive Financial Planning System (IFPS) from Execucom in Austin Texas. I do not think that we had any real competitors in Paris for that. Execucom was started by a professor in Austin (UT-Austin I suppose). I think he was Business School rather than Computer Science. But in the late 70's professors had a theory that all second generation procedural computer languages (Fortran, Cobol, Algol, PL/1, ..) could be written in Non-procedural computer languages. For example, all of our current languages (Java, C,..) execute instructions procedurally, from the top of the page to the bottom, one at a time and using branch statments(e.g. Goto° to change the execution order. Non-procedural languages had a many statements but they were executed in any order by the computer. The theory was that any procedural language could be written as a non-procedural language. It was kind of like the GOTO-Less controversy at the time(any program with a goto statement could be written without a goto statement). IFPS interactive but they put in a non-procedural batch language. Of course, all of the non-procedural languages(except one) have dried up. The only one that still exists is non other than our database friend SQL. That is its origin. I hope this is of value. I can probably put some other stuff in sometime. Jay Wortman Oracle Certified DBA A couple points on this.

This is from the software industry in 1983-84 when I worked with accounting/financial software as technical rep and sales support.

I found in some old brochures that McCormack & Dodge (M&D) was a company of Dun & Bradstreet.

When I was working for a sales company in Paris, we were flogging accounting software from Software International (SI). We had two competitors: M&D and MSA. SI software ran on IBM CMS, IBM AS/400(??), DEC VAX, Prime and a few others

As well, I worked with a Financial Planning package called Interactive Financial Planning System (IFPS) from Execucom in Austin Texas. I do not think that we had any real competitors in Paris for that.

Execucom was started by a professor in Austin (UT-Austin I suppose). I think he was Business School rather than Computer Science.

But in the late 70’s professors had a theory that all second generation procedural computer languages (Fortran, Cobol, Algol, PL/1, ..) could be written in Non-procedural computer languages. For example, all of our current languages (Java, C,..) execute instructions procedurally, from the top of the page to the bottom, one at a time and using branch statments(e.g. Goto° to change the execution order. Non-procedural languages had a many statements but they were executed in any order by the computer. The theory was that any procedural language could be written as a non-procedural language. It was kind of like the GOTO-Less controversy at the time(any program with a goto statement could be written without a goto statement).

IFPS interactive but they put in a non-procedural batch language. Of course, all of the non-procedural languages(except one) have dried up. The only one that still exists is non other than our database friend SQL. That is its origin.

I hope this is of value.

I can probably put some other stuff in sometime.

Jay Wortman
Oracle Certified DBA

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