[antonvs]

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.

[SoftTalker]

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

[rsynnott]

Nah, that came later as the canonical example, with Ruby on Rails (which also somewhat suffered from a "programmers are irrelevant now" meme). Rails would make todo apps and twitter clones too cheap to meter (pretty much all Rails tutorials involved making one or the other in like an hour, pretty much entirely in the DSL).

In practice, Rails, while quite nice, was not the productivity revolution that it was originally touted as. These things never are.

[antonvs]

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.