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Comment by antonvs

12 hours ago

I attended a CASE tools conference in the 1990s, which of course included a vendor exhibition. The vendors all had demos of creating an application using their tool. At multiple vendor stands I asked to see the code generated by their CASE tool. Invariably, the salespeople would start waffling about how the code was no longer important (sound familiar?), how you didn't need to examine the engine of a car while driving it, and so on. It had a very "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" feel to it. It convinced me that I didn't need to pay any attention to CASE tools, and history confirmed that.

Was a "to do" list the example they used at that time also?

  • Funnily enough todo lists didn’t really become a popular app category until the early 2000s. CASE tools in particular were very focused on enterprise applications.