Abstract
The rise of computers in the years following World War II is regarded by many observers as having initiated an “information revolution” rivaling in importance the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Just as the machines developed during the last century served to relieve humanity of arduous manual tasks, so the computers of the twentieth century act to unburden humankind of mental drudgery. In the very first stages of this revolution, computers took over many of the routine tasks formerly carried out by secretaries, bookkeepers, and the like. Gradually, however, computers have moved into jobs that were heretofore impossible to do because they were too time consuming. This is particularly true when it comes to scientific computing: scientists making computations to analyze systems and trying to predict what will happen in the future. A single modern computer can perform billions of calculations per second. Even if every man, woman, and child in the United States were given an adding machine and hired to do arithmetic, they could not achieve that kind of speed. So a new world has been opened to scientists.
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Karplus, W.J. (1992). What Are Catastrophes?. In: The Heavens Are Falling. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6024-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6024-5_1
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