That is precisely what happened. When, a century and a half later, the cost of arithmetic fell low enough, there were thousands of applications for arithmetic that most had never dreamed of. Arithmetic was such an important input into so many things that, when it became cheap, just as light had before, it changed the world. Reducing something to pure cost terms has a way of cutting through hype, although it does not help make the latest and greatest technology seem exciting. You’d never have seen Steve Jobs announce “a new adding machine,” even though that is all he ever did. By reducing the
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