"I started my career at Microsoft, a little software company outside of Seattle, where I was a program manager on the Excel team. My area was “programmability” and most of what I worked on in those days was replacing the Excel macro language (XLMs) with Excel Basic, and providing an object-oriented interface to Excel. Excel Basic became Visual Basic for Applications and the OO interface is what you know as OLE Automation, a.k.a. IDispatch."
-- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/AboutMe.html