ABSTRACT
During the 1950s and 1960s electronic communications and computing systems made it possible to perform in minutes or even in a fraction of a second calculations and operations which previously took weeks, months or years, or could not be performed at all, and to perform them with a higher degree of reliability and at a lower cost than by older methods (Table 7.1). Beginning with radio communications in the 1890s and television in the 1930s, the applications of electronics have spread first to systems of detection and navigation (radar), and since the war to computers for data processing and to the control of a great variety of industrial processes. Technical progress in computers https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Measure
Vacuum-tube computers (early 1950s)
Hybrid integrated circuits-360 system (late 1960s)
Components per cubic foot
2,000
30,000
Multiplication per second a
2,500
375,000
Cost ($) of 100,000 computations
1.38
0.04
A single multiplication on mechanical or the first electromechanical computers took more than one second.
Source: Fortune (1966), September.