I worked on an early spreadsheet and word-processing system at Lehman Brothers back in about 1984. The system was called Jacquard. The investment bankers built comparative financials in this system and printed them out on 14x11 folded paper. The deal was that you could enter formulas into a bar, with a formula for each column, and drag the bar down to apply the formula to the cells.
Sounds a bit like Lotus Improv or the older Javelin --- any articles on it?