Electrical engineering and the computer: A look at the practical uses of computer modeling in industry and academe

The evolving saga of the computer/information revolution is a fascinating one. Raw computer power alone has increased by a factor of approximately a million (from ~ 1,000 to ~ 10
⁹
Floating-point Operations per Second or FLOPS) between the introduction of the UNIVAC-1 (about 1953) and the CRAY-2 (about 1986). Along with this speed increase have come similar improvements in highspeed memory (from ~ 10
⁴
to ~ 10
¹⁰
bits), and input/output speed (from ~ 10
²
to ~ 10
⁶
bits/sec). There is no other area of human activity where comparable advances have occurred in the same time frame.