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Before the advent of AI and the internet was the computer revolution. Computers made arithmetic—specifically, adding up lots of things—cheap. One of the first killer apps was to make bookkeeping easy.
Computer engineer Dan Bricklin had this in mind when, as an MBA student, he was frustrated by doing repeated calculations to assess the different scenarios in Harvard Business School cases. So he wrote a computer program to do those calculations and found it so useful that he, along with Bob Frankston, developed it into VisiCalc for the Apple II computer. VisiCalc was the first killer app of the personal computing era and the reason many businesses first brought a computer into their offices.1 Not only did it reduce by a hundredfold ...
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