| This a good article with some fascinating history. More recent history involves the production of CALS tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALS_Table_Model. The company Datalogics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalogics was heavily involved in the CALS table initiative. Datalogics staff was part of the ISO committee forming SGML, and trained many people on SGML, including DoD staff and their contractors involved with documentation. I was involved with the team that produced an editor for SGML-based documents. It had as one of its features the ability to specify the formatting of an element based on the SGML context of that element. This was before XSLT and its kin. Alumni of Datalogics helped Microsoft learn about XML ("No, you can't arbitrarily switch case on XML element tags"). Also TeX practitioners have pretty well-formed opinions about how tables should be formatted. Odd side-note: I learned that the documentation for a fighter airplane of the time, if printed out, would weigh more than the aircraft and would fill a football-field sized collection of filing cabinets. And as much as many today don't like XML, coming from the SGML world it is a boon. |
Indeed. I don’t think it’s all correct, though. On Visicalc, it says “The grid cells couldn’t be styled with borders for presentation purposes, the values couldn’t be formatted, and the tables couldn’t even be printed”
I think I even the first version had (limited, of course) formatting support.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/refcard3.htm says the “/F” command allowed setting justification and setting the number format to, for example, dollars and cents.
It is for version 1.35, but I think even the first version shipped supported at least showing dollars and cents.