Word: spreading
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...computers in U.S. schools, compared with 52,000 only 18 months ago. This is roughly one for every 400 pupils. The richer and more progressive states do better. Minnesota leads with one computer for every 50 children and a locally produced collection of 700 software programs. To spread this development more evenly and open new doors for business, Apple has offered to donate one computer to every public school in the U S.?a total of 80,000 computers worth $200 million retail?if Washington will authorize a 25% tax write-off (as is done for donations of scientific...
...idea dawned on Daniel Bricklin in 1978, while he was looking blear-eyed at blackboards filled with columns of numbers during classes at the Harvard Business School. The professor would be engaged in one of those "what-if," or spread sheet, exercises in corporate financial planning for which the B School is famed. Every time a figure in one of the columns was changed, those in several other columns had to be recalculated as well. "Just one mistake on my calculator," recalls Bricklin, 31, "and I would end up moaning, 'My God, I got the whole series of numbers...
That winter Bricklin, an M.I.T graduate and confessed computer "nerd" since his teens in Philadelphia, and an M.I.T. buddy, Bob Frankston, 33, worked day and night to develop a program for doing such number crunching on a small computer. The result was an electronic spread sheet: VisiCalc (visible calculator). Initially, VisiCalc got a lukewarm reception from computer stores. But when another B School grad, Daniel Fylstra, 31, who had just started up his own company, Personal Software Inc., stepped up the marketing, VisiCalc took off. Word began to get out about its enormous powers. With only a few presses...
...double the previous year's). Bricklin and his partner, Frankston, are planning a host of new computer software, including a math program called TK!Solver (after the proofreader's abbreviation for "to come"). They hope it will do for business and scientific models what VisiCalc does for spread sheets...
...seem. For one thing, the twins are at ease in a landscape of striking beauty and variety. Each year spring renews the earth around them: "Shreds of cloud hung motionless in the sky. The hills were silvery in the sunlight, the hedges white with hawthorn, and the buttercups spread a film of gold over the fields. The paddock was thick with bleating sheep." As old men, Lewis and Benjamin follow the trails of their childhood: "Along the horizon, the hills were layered in lines of hazy blue; and they reflected how little had changed since they walked this way with...