In the beginning, we used to count computers. There were four: one in Philadelphia, one in Aberdeen, one in Cambridge, and one in Washington. Then there were ten. Then, suddenly, there were two hundred. The last figure heard was thirty-five thousand. The computers proliferated, and generation followed generation, until now the fifty dollar hand-held job packs more computing power than the hippopotamian hulks rusting in the Smithsonian: the ENIACS, the MARKS, the SEACS, and the GOLEMS. Perhaps tomorrow the $1.98 computer will flood the drugstores and become a throwaway object like a plastic razor or a piece of Kleenex.

Legend has it that in the late 1940s when old Tom Watson of the IBM corporation learned of the potentialities of the computer he estimated that two or three of them would take care of the needs of the nation. Neither he nor anyone else foresaw how the mathematical needs of the nation would rise up miraculously to fill the available computing power.