13. In 1949 it was predicted by Popular Mechanics that in the future computers would only weigh 1.5 tons, a naively conservative assumption with the benefit of hindsight
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (or ENIAC) was one of the earliest general-purpose computers ever created, capable of solving numerical problems through reprogramming and possessing the estimable status of being Turing-complete. Designed primarily for the calculation of artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory, with its first assignment the study of thermonuclear weapons, the ENIAC was popularly known as a “Giant Brain” for its immense computing power. Whereas a human would take 20 hours to calculate a particular trajectory problem, an ENIAC would do so in just 30 seconds, rendering 1 ENIAC hour equivalent to 2,400 human hours.
Less convenient, however, was that the ENAIC cost $500,000 ($6.5m in 2018) and, due in part to its required 30,000 vacuum tubes, weighed approximately 30 tons. Predicting the future condition of modern computers, the scientific magazine Popular Mechanics famously claimed in 1949 that “computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1.5 tons”, with the power to “do in a few hours what a human mathematician couldn’t do with a million pencils in a hundred life-times.”