... want to fuss with soldering irons: all the ingre- dients for a functioning PC were provided in a convenient molded plastic case. It looked clunky, y... ...someone’s desk. Instead of puzzling over bits of hardware or typing up punch cards to feed into someone else’s main- frame, Apple owners faced only th... ...e of a cryptic blinking cursor in the up- per left corner of the screen: the PC awaited instructions. But the hurdle was not high. Some owners were in... ...VisiCalc helped to convince a skeptical world that there was a place for the PC at every- one’s desk and hence a market to build many, and to build th... .... They had their hunches, but, fortunately for them, nothing constrained the PC to the hunches of the founders. Apple did not even know that VisiCalc ... ...ything that is on the phone.... Y o u d o n ’ t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone an... ..., and over the next sev- eral years he spent his spare time devising a punch card system for sur- veyors to use. The U.S. government commissioned him ... ...tally the 1890 Census with his new system, which consisted of a set of punch cards and associated readers that used spring-mounted needles to pass thr... ...d readers that used spring-mounted needles to pass through the holes in each card, creating an electrical loop that ad- vanced the reader’s tally for ...