Yes. Personal Computers were typewriters and calculators for the first 10 years. That's not to diminish their importance - quite the opposite. The impact cha

Yes. Personal Computers were typewriters and calculators for the first 10 years. That's not to diminish their importance - quite the opposite. The impact changed the world. That's why it took a whole decade. Consider that when the IBM PC was launched, offices the world over had typing pools populated by women whose job it was to type whatever they were given. Spreadsheets changed the world. We went from 1 or 2 types of tuna and 1 or 2 types of olive oil in the supermarket to dozens of each. Why? How? The big enabler was Lotus 1-2-3. Product managers in food companies could manage the ingredients, inventory, branding, marketing and sales performance of dozens of products at a time instead of just one or two. The spreadsheet was a fancy calculator, in the same way that a machine gun is a fancy pistol, and a combine harvester is a fancy hoe. The first decade of personal computers enabled office work to scale, and it reconfigured literacy by enabling individuals to type letters when they felt like it. The fax machine was right there alongside, like the hammer and the sickle of capitalism. The resulting boost to productivity touched every industry the world over.