So we needed computers before they were built and made cheap enough for most people to afford? Why didn't the government fill that need? We got along fine without computers for decades.
Bill Gates supports Obama's Common Core, aka dumbing down America even more.
Often a "want" supplied quickly becomes a need. Back in ancient times, when accountants used #2 pencils, a spreadsheet was a piece of paper, often large, in which a number would be changed, and then successive calculations were manually changed using that #2 lencil and an eraser. When Visicalc came out, ca, 1980, a CPM-based computer did those "erasures" and recalculations that took minutes in a second or two at most. IOW, computers weren't needed, but they soon became essential. The same could be said of Wordstar and word processing & desktop publishing.
In fairness, government and universities were in on the earliest days of computers, in the 1940s and 1950s; military necessity played a large, if not huge, role in that involvement. By the late 60s companies like IBM, Burroughs, and DEC were driving computer development and innovation. Then along came Intel ... (and Motorola and a host of other microprocessors and microcontrollers).
