Shown here 70 years ago is Mrs. Connie Hodgson of Syracuse, NY, one of six “intelligent adults” who pitted their multiplication skills against General Electric’s OARAC computer, shown behind her.

The computer was on its way to the U.S. Air Force, but before it left, it showed off its skills by competing against the human contestants in calculating 8,645,392,175 x 8,645,392,175, to get the right answer of 74,742,805,859,551,230,625.

Of course, someone armed with a slide rule would have been able to come up with the right answer of 7.474 x 10^19 almost as fast as OARAC

None of the human contestants got the right answer. Mrs. Hodgson came the closest, but she is pointing to the spot where she forgot to carry a 1, making her final answer be off by a trillion. And, as they say, a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

And OARAC was much faster, crunching the numbers in about 1/1000 second. The humans took between 4-1/2 and 8 minutes to get the wrong answer.

Bill Gates will be glad to know that the Windows calculator got the same answer as OARAC, and it seemed a little faster than 1/1000 second, although I wasn’t able to time it.

The photo appeared in Popular Mechanics, June 1953.