#compsci 

LANPAR is historically the first spreadsheet software.

## Development
Created by Rene Pardo and Remy Landau at Bell Canada in 1969, filed for patent in 1970.

LANPAR stands for "LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random" (but really it was a mash-up of LANdau and PARdo)

## Structure
LANPAR used a grid of cells, called "boxes".
Each box was referenced by a row and column:
![[Pasted image 20251218062304.png]]
(row 1, column 01, etc)

LANPAR worked like that: users would enter box data into a file using plain text, each row started on a new line, and boxes were separated by semicolons.
Boxes could contain one of 3 kinds of values:
- INPUT to prompt the user for a value
- K to create a numerical constant, K3.14 for the value 3.14
- a calculation that references only other boxes, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation

![[Pasted image 20251218062457.png]]

### Forward references
The genius of LANPAR was that calculations could use forward references, by refereceing calculations that were yet to be resolved:
![[Pasted image 20251218062544.png]]