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I think CASE - (Computer aided software engineering) was starting to come about that time iirc. Business folk would just drag and drop stuff in these new fangle

I think CASE - (Computer aided software engineering) was starting to come about that time iirc. Business folk would just drag and drop stuff in these new fangled GUI's and everyone would go home early. Edit: That crab stuffed fillet sounds good

zozbot234 5y ago
Wasn't CASE just a fancy word for what we now call IDEs? Business people might not do much dragging and dropping there, but developers do it quite a bit.
- detaro 5y ago
  CASE is more the "draw UML diagrams/flow charts/... and the code is generated" and vice-versa stuff.
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  I used Oracle CASE at the time, it had a "data dictionary" where you defined the database schema in terms of the business terms and you could match it to the physical elements in the tables. I think there was also a tool that you could make business logic in and maybe map to SQL*Forms (the user screen painter). There was an idea of being able to join these together somehow, but I don't recall the mechanics.
- varjag 5y ago
  The promise of CASE was closer to the promise of now Copilot, but hard coded instead of statistical.
- rauhl 5y ago
  As others indicated, CASE was more about code generation rather than smart IDEs. My recollection from the time is that the industry really strongly believed that almost no-one would write actual textual lines of codes and that graphical programming was going to be where it was at. Looking back, it’s a remarkable delusion: mankind went from pictures to pictograms to text, not in the reverse. The career path everyone expected (mentioned elsethread: go from a junior guy-who-writes-lines to an architect guy-who-draws-pictures) doesn’t really make sense. If anything, while a high-level architectural document needs to have some diagrams, even more than that it needs to have text: text to describe the problem being solved, the context, the potential solutions and the reasons to choose one solution over the rest. Likewise, it’s striking how many PowerPoint slides could be effectively replaced with short point papers … but that’s a discussion for another time. I am not 100% sure of why the industry had this wrong-headed idea, as I was too young at one point in time and too junior at another to really have good context. Maybe it was the rise of GUIs which led folks to think, ‘gosh, if pictures can enable folks to use a computer easily, then they will enable folks to program a computer easily!’ Or maybe it was the unfortunate habit non-experts have of not really understanding an expert’s field. As I recall, it also had a very strong correlation with the rise of OOP.
yaboy 5y ago
Only $9.95!
- thebiss 5y ago
  *per HOUR. Some early case tools were $1000/seat/month.

zozbot234 5y ago

Wasn't CASE just a fancy word for what we now call IDEs? Business people might not do much dragging and dropping there, but developers do it quite a bit.

detaro 5y ago
CASE is more the "draw UML diagrams/flow charts/... and the code is generated" and vice-versa stuff.
chadcmulligan 5y ago
I used Oracle CASE at the time, it had a "data dictionary" where you defined the database schema in terms of the business terms and you could match it to the physical elements in the tables. I think there was also a tool that you could make business logic in and maybe map to SQL*Forms (the user screen painter). There was an idea of being able to join these together somehow, but I don't recall the mechanics.
varjag 5y ago
The promise of CASE was closer to the promise of now Copilot, but hard coded instead of statistical.
rauhl 5y ago
As others indicated, CASE was more about code generation rather than smart IDEs. My recollection from the time is that the industry really strongly believed that almost no-one would write actual textual lines of codes and that graphical programming was going to be where it was at. Looking back, it’s a remarkable delusion: mankind went from pictures to pictograms to text, not in the reverse. The career path everyone expected (mentioned elsethread: go from a junior guy-who-writes-lines to an architect guy-who-draws-pictures) doesn’t really make sense. If anything, while a high-level architectural document needs to have some diagrams, even more than that it needs to have text: text to describe the problem being solved, the context, the potential solutions and the reasons to choose one solution over the rest. Likewise, it’s striking how many PowerPoint slides could be effectively replaced with short point papers … but that’s a discussion for another time. I am not 100% sure of why the industry had this wrong-headed idea, as I was too young at one point in time and too junior at another to really have good context. Maybe it was the rise of GUIs which led folks to think, ‘gosh, if pictures can enable folks to use a computer easily, then they will enable folks to program a computer easily!’ Or maybe it was the unfortunate habit non-experts have of not really understanding an expert’s field. As I recall, it also had a very strong correlation with the rise of OOP.

yaboy 5y ago

Only $9.95!

thebiss 5y ago
*per HOUR. Some early case tools were $1000/seat/month.