People may not want to admit it, but our world would be a horrible place to live if it weren’t for computers. Computers do our taxes for us, they order our food, and they even ride our motorcycles! They’re amazing things that can do amazing things. They seem larger than life now, even to the point where it seems as if they’ve just always been here. But, they weren’t always here. There was a time when computers were just a fantasy. Let me take you back to that time—that dark and horrible time.

The year was 1958 and Herman Fantyshish, an American manure farmer, was sitting at his workbench trying his damnedest to figure out why his fecal comb loom wasn’t spinning the poop to its potential. He knew that eighty-or-so more yards of fine manure could be spun out of one pile. He just couldn’t figure out the problem.

“If only there were some sort of machine that could conculate the schematics I need to maximize my poopstring output against my manure piles!” He filed his idea with the patent office, and the idea of the computer was born.

In 1962 on Fantyshish’s seventy-ninth birthday a man by the name of William Willy Wilcox called him and asked him if they could meet up and talk about his conculater idea. Fantyshish agreed.

Wilcox had an idea for a machine that could add and subtract. All he needed was the right to Fantyshish’s patent and he could start to work. Fantyshish sold his idea to Wilcox for eighty-five dollars and a paper bag full of medicinal leeches.

Armed with Fantyshish’s idea and his blessing, Wilcox began working on his adding machine. Eight years and three hundred patents later, Wilcox had his machine. Slightly taller than a three-story building and four city blocks long, his machine was a monster—an adding monster. It was a marvel in its time. It could conculate simple equations, such as four plus four, in thirty-two minutes flat.

The world was immediately turned upside down. Teachers were protesting for fear that they would lose their jobs to this gigantic adding machine. Abacus factories laid off tens of thousands of workers. Kids were worried that their fingers would become obsolete.

After a few years the hysteria settled. After only four machines went into production, people realized that there was nothing to worry about. The machines failed to catch on any further and were therefore forgotten.

Eleven years later, in the library of a small community college outside of Camilla, North Dakota, Josh Hartnett picked up a book called My Adding Machine. In this book he read the story of William Willy Wilcox. The story triggered something inside of Hartnett, and from that moment on, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He immediately set out to improve Wilcox’s machine, and in three short years he figured out how to fit the machine into a single room. He also enabled it to divide, multiply, and play rattler-race. He won the Nobel peace prize and sold thousands of his machines to the government and many other organizations.

Josh Hartnett retired and left his nameless company to his son, Joey Hartnett, who had become a top engineer/programmer at his father’s plant. Joey Hartnett quickly gave his company a name: Millicomp International (even though they had never sold a unit outside of the United States).

All of that was about to change.