Plenty of Room Outside the Firm

away the still primitive state and expense of computers and foresee the potential of computers that were many times more powerful and cheap. More importantly, Engelbart was much better at imagining applications. Hartree limited his vision to applications that involved differential equations. Engelbart envisioned an office work prosthesis, mostly based upon bookkeeping of types of things and links between them, with some graphics thrown in for ease of human interaction. Even today, computers are still good at performing numerical calculations, which are as useful for graphics as they were for ballistics in the early days of computing. Throw in some maps, and you can compute paths from one place to another. Perhaps more importantly in the long run, computers are good at bookkeeping, which is, in essence, sorting and tracking things and making decisions based on the results. It’s a very powerful idea. So, the first success of computing, after ballistics, was in counting, sorting, and th...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INTERNET
• Authors: Charles J. Petrie
• Keywords: Bookkeeping, Computers, Firm Charles Petrie, INTERNET 2010