Background / History
TPL Tables has its roots in the Table Producing Language (TPL) system, developed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the 1970s and early 1980s to run on IBM mainframes. It was one of the first software languages that was task oriented rather than procedure oriented. To create a table in TPL, the user needed to specify his data and describe what his table should look like. He did not need to write procedures to create the table. This was in sharp contrast to the Cobol and PL/1 programs people were using at BLS to create tables before TPL. When statistical offices began moving to databases, TPL extended its non-procedural model to database access
The mainframe software gained international popularity during its time, particularly in government statistical offices, but at a substantial number of other sites as well. The BLS version of TPL was distributed by the United Nations. When TPL evolved into a commercial product, the UN connections remained. This led to such diverse customers as the census of the Comoros Islands and the census of the Peoples Republic of China
BLS ceased major software development of the software in the early to mid-1980s. At that time, two developers of the mainframe product founded QQQ Software, Inc. and began development of TPL Tables, rewriting the system for PCs and Unix systems. The first version of TPL Tables was released in 1987. The current version is 7.0.
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