I was sort of grateful, then, that Walter Isaacson tried to tackle the matter in his new book, "The Innovators": a solidly researched, lucidly written account of digital invention, from calculating machines to the collaborative Web.
Customers were happy to buy electric "calculating machines", as Thomas Watson senior insisted on calling them, from the same firm that had sold them their electromechanical predecessors.
"I know some of you think of me as a number-crunching, desiccated, calculating machine," he tells his party.
Holmes is a cold, calculating machine, a man who is, as one critic put it, "a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bull-dog".
It's obvious if you look at how people trade in markets: they are not calculating machines that flawlessly discount future corporate profits.
The heirs to the typewriters and calculating machines are designed under the leadership of a Briton, Jonathan Ive, but for Apple Inc of California.
The rugged trails that over history have been trod by cowboys, gauchos, ranch hands, and in Australia, swagmen, are now to be presided over by cold, calculating machines.
Total machine setup time when converting from one machine setting to another is used to calculate machine setup cost for each machine.
"Even if we know what the rational thing to do is, we're not cold, calculating machines — we're human beings," he added.
Curta calculating machines, popular in the 1950s and 1960s, fetch a few hundred dollars.
