“The modern high speed computer, impressive as its performance is from the point of view of absolute accomplishment, is from the point of view of getting the available logical equipment adequately engaged in the computation, very inefficient indeed,” Bigelow observed. The individual components, despite being capable of operating continuously at high speed, “are interconnected in such a way that on the average almost all of them are waiting for one (or a very few of their number) to act. The average duty cycle of each cell is scandalously low.”
