Something attacked my computer.
I shut the page, and some old one popped up.
I shut it, and they popped up again
I shut my browser, and Notepad++ was filling with <cr><lf>
I closed Notepad++, closed every open app, and restarted.
I went out to talk with a guy, back in about 1995, in Chicago, fired up APL on his notebook, loaded the JPMorgan Risk Metrics data set, fiddled a bit, and reduced the thing to a one-line formula in an interactive window - like a Jupyter Notebook.
I chatted with Gemini about it seems close:
"""It sounds like you were using the Jacquard J100 or J500 specifically as a "shared-logic" workstation.
...
The Software: AM Jacquard "Data-Rite"
While Jacquard was famous for its Type-Rite word processor, the spreadsheet-like functionality for bankers was likely a component of Data-Rite.
Here is why your description fits so perfectly:
Row-Column Text Format: Unlike modern spreadsheets that are "cell-centric," these early systems were often "record-centric." They functioned more like a flat-file database, with each row a record and each column a field.
The "Formula Bar": In Jacquard’s system, you didn't usually put a formula into an individual cell. You entered a "Procedure" or a "Calculation Rule" at the top of a column.
"Drawing Down": When you "drew the bar down," you were essentially telling the mini-computer to execute a Batch Process on the text file. It would sweep through the records, applying your math (e.g., Col C = Col A * Col B) to every row in the file."""
It was old when I got there. I never saw any manual; they barely let me touch it.
I worked on an early spreadsheet and word-processing system at Lehman Brothers back in about 1984. The system was called Jacquard.
The investment bankers built comparative financials in this system and printed them out on 14x11 folded paper.
The deal was that you could enter formulas into a bar, with a formula for each column, and drag the bar down to apply the formula to the cells.
I bought the book "A SUMERIAN OBSERVATION OF THE KÖFELS’ IMPACT EVENT" by Mark Hempsell, and Alan Bond. Tried to do a film adaptation, about 10 years ago.
One part in Sumer and another in the Alps.
My early boss had a different approach. If you want a promotion, you need to have people in place who can do your job. That was touchy. If I had people capable of doing my job, what would happen when we do layoffs (which happened regularly)? But it was also through a period of strong growth, so the boss needed proven people in place to take on new opportunities.
Working for a firm during its strong growth phase is very different from trying to climb a 10,000-deep corporate ladder.