It was used for roles similar to the COBOL programming language or PL/1, but was far easier to use and the instructions normally consisted of a single piece of paper that was converted to a few punch cards.
Customers lauded the product for its time savings, often able to generate one-off reports in a matter of days when weeks or months would be needed with traditional tools.
[3] A number of report generator programs had been introduced by the early 1960s, but they generally had little or no flexibility to adapt to different file formats.
In essence, dictionaries were used to convert variant data into a single internal table-like format and given column names.
[4] A report is run by loading a request form into the card reader, and the tapes containing the data files onto the drives.
A library of over 100 dictionaries describing various input and output formats was developed, and it was found that even non-programmers could successfully learn how to create request forms to produce the reports they needed.
Looking for more customers, Postley arranged funding from the federal government to make a demonstration program that could not only produce printed reports, but also new files.
[8] Informatics, Inc. had formed in 1962 by three employees of Ramo-Wooldridge (later known as TRW) Walter Bauer, Richard Hill and Werner Frank.
Bauer was convinced that the ongoing shortage of programmers would force companies to turn to consulting firms, and Informatics was created to fill that need.
Hughes was so desperate to get rid of Dynamics that he agreed to pay Informatics $38,000 to take it off his hands at the end of the two weeks.
Postley was convinced this was going to open the market for a product that could be sold to end-users directly, what we would now call commercial software.
Even when a product offered obvious advantages, many prospective customers would not buy it, believing IBM would release something similar in the future.
This was a particular sore spot for Applied Data Research's product Autoflow, a system that produced flowcharts by reading the assembler language code for a program.
As CA VISION:BUILDER,[14] it became part of the product suite from Computer Associates once that company acquired Sterling Software in 2000.
[15] Following the acquisition of Computer Associates by Broadcom Inc in 2018, CA VISION:BUILDER was listed as a legacy product by the new owner.