On this date in 1944 one of the first computers, the IBM Mark I, became operational.  See the Wiki article here.  From the article: [The Mark I] could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second.  A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute. Now, here is the question for the class.  What is the difference, in principle, between the Mark I and the IBM Summit, which, as of late 2018, became the fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of performing calculations at the rate of 148.6 petaflops (one petaflop is one thousand million million floating-point operations per second)? The answer, of course, is “absolutely nothing.”  Both Read More ›