What was the cost of computers in 1946?

Answer 1

In 1946, there were not more than two or three computing machines in the world.

Since the transistor had not been invented yet, any such machine had to be built

with vacuum tubes. It filled most of the space in a moderate-size building, and

the rest of the building held the cooling system that was needed to keep the

'computer' from overheating. It worked on analog quantities, not digital, which

meant that it had to be totally recalibrated every day, before it could be used for

any meaningful work. Having so many vacuum tubes in it, on account of plain old

probability and "mean-time-between-failure" arithmetic, chances were that one or

more vacuum tubes would fail and have to be replaced every day. All in all, it took

a large staff of people to operate it. It was built and used for military computing,

and was funded by the federal government ... which was lucky, because it was so

expensive to keep it running that it would not have been worth the expense to any

individual or industry. As far as the general population was concerned, nobody had

a computer, so nobody needed one.

Sir Charles Darwin ... grandson of the famous naturalist ... was head of Britain's

National Physical Laboratory, where research into computers was taking place.

In 1946, he wrote:

It is very possible that ... one machine would suffice to solve all of the

problems that are demanded of it from the whole country.