CSIRAC's vital statistics

When you look at the chart below, you might think that CSIRAC was a pretty slow machine, but you must compare it to what was available to the scientists of the time.

Scientists of the 1940's would employ one or more computers (generally a woman operating a mechanical adding machine), or manually perform complex computations by hand, to complete their research. Calculations could be performed at about the rate of one operation per second.

CSIRAC, although slow by today's standards, was faster than anything else available at the time at 1000 operations per second.

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