I remember my father coming home in the 80s from work with a book detailing an environment they built at the company he worked at for creating complete business

I remember my father coming home in the 80s from work with a book detailing an environment they built at the company he worked at for creating complete business systems by just configuring building blocks; no code at all. You modeled the data, modeled the screens, modeled the processes by picking options of screens covered in dropdowns and input fields: the end result was a working system. Sounds familiar? It was extremely close to Bubble with a different GUI. It worked until clients asked feature that were very hard or impossible to make and they add to add features or code extensions; after a while they noted that many projects were just extensions upon extensions. They ended up taking out the modeling part and use it like UML type of thing, but the no code was removed in favor of people writing it manually following the modeled parts.