Electronic Abacus

yoey writes: "Blast from the past in an article at the Economist: There are those who do not believe in the desirability of introducing anything as esoteric as electronics into business routine at all. Others believe that there is a limited field for electronic methods, provided that they fit into, and do not disrupt, established business systems. But there is a third group ... who consider that a major revolution in office methods may be possible. This revolution would involve scrapping the greater part of the established punch card calculating routine and substituting a single 'electronic office' where the giant computor [sic] would perform internally all the calculations needed for a whole series of book-keeping operations, printing the final answer in and on whatever form was required."

Comments

Reliability

[tonywestonuk]

From the article: "...Although there are no moving parts to go wrong, the law of averages seems to dictate that some of the myriad components will occasionally fail, and scientists who work regularly on computors rely on the machine being available for at best only 80 per cent of its theoretical working time "

And I thought technology progresses? - I'm sure I spend at least 20% of my time waiting for good 'ol Windows to reboot! :-)