This is a historical question. What what was the first program that
let people design reports by filling out forms instead of by writing
code, whether the code was in SQL or some 4GL? The earliest in my
memory is dBase III, which was released in 1984, but there must have
been something earlier than that on a non-PC platform.

By "filling out forms," note that I'm not talking about a GUI
interface; it could be character-based, as long as the user didn't
have to write out a series of instructions. Also, I'm sure there were
plenty of CICS apps that let people create reports by picking fields
from a particular database, but I want to know about commercial
products that would work with any database created with a particular
database management system.

thanks,

Bob DuCharme
(bobdc e-mail address above no longer active. See bottom of
www.snee.com/bob for real one.)