Here are a few of the problems people had that Apple and Microsoft solved: 1) Maintaining a general ledger for your business (and all the calculations) by hand

Here are a few of the problems people had that Apple and Microsoft solved: 1) Maintaining a general ledger for your business (and all the calculations) by hand & on paper was tedious and labor intensive. VisiCalc was the first "killer app" that made loads of people want to buy an Apple. Apple provided the platform to make VisiCalc possible. On the PC side, the driver was Lotus 123, then MS Excel. 2) Using a typewriter was annoying, especially when you need to fix a mistake. (e.g. Liquid Paper, Wite-out). On the PC side, there was WordPerfect, then MS Word.