First there were simple applications: accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll. From these simple applications programmers wrote simple reports: how much was the total payroll, how much money was withheld for deductions, how many invoices are 30 days late -- and so forth. Then, applications became more sophisticated. We had inventory management, online reservations, banking machine ATM management, airlines reservations, and the like. With these more sophisticated applications we produced much more sophisticated information.
Then the corporation sprouted appli