> One of my problems was to provide statistical advice to the people who were developing metals to be used in the blades of turbines. I had an enormous amount of data, and I had to construct a regression with five or six different variables having to do with the chemical composition of the metals.
> We estimated that it would take us three months to solve this problem using our desk calculators. In the whole country there was only one calculator—one computer, if you want to call it that—which could do this problem more quickly.
> It was up at Harvard. It wasn’t electronic. It was a whole collection of IBM card sorters. It was in a big, air-conditioned gymnasium, a tremendous collection of sorters all linked by wires. It did our problem for us in forty hours.
As he mentioned elsewhere, it did not work as expected back then.
> One of my problems was to provide statistical advice to the people who were developing metals to be used in the blades of turbines. I had an enormous amount of data, and I had to construct a regression with five or six different variables having to do with the chemical composition of the metals.
> We estimated that it would take us three months to solve this problem using our desk calculators. In the whole country there was only one calculator—one computer, if you want to call it that—which could do this problem more quickly.
> It was up at Harvard. It wasn’t electronic. It was a whole collection of IBM card sorters. It was in a big, air-conditioned gymnasium, a tremendous collection of sorters all linked by wires. It did our problem for us in forty hours.
As he mentioned elsewhere, it did not work as expected back then.
[1] https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collection...