They have been building these tools, one at a time, for years. There is, just to name one example, a cash register and typewriter company called the Electrical Till Corporation that makes a dandy punched-card machine for tabulating large quantities of data. Waterhouse’s professor in Iowa was tired of solving differential equations one at a time and invented a machine to solve them automatically by storing the information on a capacitor-covered drum and cranking through a certain algorithm. Given enough time and enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers, and another one to keep track of inventories, and another one to alphabetize lists of words. A well-equipped business would have one of each: gleaming cast-iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and a clawhammer in his box.