Exploring the history of TM1, OLAP, and business planning software.

TM1 Fanboy explores the history of TM1, OLAP, and business planning software from 1983 to the present day.

Introduced at the dawn of personal computing, TM1 has survived through client-server architectures, enterprise planning, business intelligence, cloud platforms, and now artificial intelligence.

Few enterprise software products have endured such a long sequence of technological change.

This publication examines TM1 not primarily as a planning tool, but as a historical lens through which to understand the evolution of business computing, planning, and organizational decision-making.

Learn more about the publication

Recent Essays

  • Origins and the Initial Release: A Problem of Dates
    When was TM/1 founded? The answer depends on which event you choose to call its beginning. Some sources place the origins of TM/1 in 1980, others point to a mainframe prototype in 1981, the formation of Sinper in 1983, the product announcement at PC Expo the same year, or the commercial release that followed shortly thereafter. Rather than searching for a single founding date, this article argues that TM/1 emerged through a sequence of developments stretching across several years. By comparing contemporary trade press, internal histories, vendor narratives, and later recollections, it explores how different sources tell different versions of the same story—and what that reveals about the challenges of writing software history. The result is not a definitive date, but a more interesting question: how does a technology actually come into existence?
  • Mind the Gap: Why TM/1 Made Sense in the 1980s
    Part 1 of 5 in The Functional Database Before OLAP series. Why did TM/1 emerge in the early 1980s? This essay explores the analytical gap between relational databases, spreadsheets, and multidimensional planning.
  • Why TM1 Matters
    Why should anyone care about the history of a planning system? This introductory essay argues that TM1’s forty-year survival makes it a unique lens through which to understand the evolution of business computing.