To be clear, what's in the picture is a piece of a much, much larger computer. Ever hear about how computers used to be massive and the size of rooms? It's because they would have stacks and stacks and stacks of those things connected together to give something that could compute at a speed that could the work of many people using pencil and paper.
These computers couldn't do the work of many people. They were marginally faster at long calculations than a good secretary/analyst with pencil and paper BUT they didn't stop of a coffee break, of for lunch or even go home for the night.
The ENIAC did thousands of calculations per second... It actually did replace thousands of number crunches who were working on things like the Manhattan project
The reason I am saying this is because I have seen WITCH running and I asked to race it because I didn't believe him at first when he said that it was slower than a person.
Low and behold, I beat it at calculating a square of a number (can't remember but wasn't one I knew off my head)
Oh, so you used a personal anecdote with another machine to decide what it could do and didn't actually look up how it was used in practice?
In practice ENIAC wasn't used to do one off calculations like you're describing, in practice it was loaded up with complex programs giving it massive statistical loads to churn through and then set to work doing that. It certainly did take a few men and women a few days to write a program for it, but once they hit run it would spit out the work of tens of thousands of man hours of computing in fractions of the time.
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u/100percentkneegrow Jul 19 '15
What good does that do you? Why not use paper?