Rene Pardo & Remy Landau Introduce LANPAR, the First Commercial Electronic Spreadsheet

In 1969 Canadians Rene Pardo and Remy Landau developed the first commercial electronic spreadsheet called LANPAR (LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random). Pardo and Landau developed LANPAR in response to the problem that Bell Canada and AT&T had in changing the 2000 cells in their budgeting forms. The lead time for the MIS groups to rewrite the software in Fortran was 6 months to 2 years. LANPAR introduced forward referencing and natural order recalculation, which allowed for a complex set of connections to be quickly charted across the aray of cells of an electronic ledger. LANPAR was sold to the Plant Budgeting Divisions of Bell Canada, AT&T and the 18 Operating Telephone Companies across the U.S. and Long Lines, in addition to General Motors in Warren, Michigan. 

The program ran on the General Electric 400 On-Line Time Sharing Series on several computers in North America, and on mainframes used by Bell Canada, AT&T and General Motors.