The computer industry has experienced rapid technical growth in the past. Computer performance, in terms of operations per dollar, has improved between 1950 and 1962 at a rate of more than 80 percent per year.* During this period it has been found that the power of a computer is approximately proportional to the square of its cost; a computer costing ten times as much as another will be 100 times more powerful and will process a unit of throughput at 1/10 the cost of the cheaper machine.**

*KE Knight, compared 225 general purpose computer systems manufactured between 1944 and 1963. His findings were that computer performance, in terms of operations per dollar, had improved between 1950 and 1962 at an average rate of 81 percent per year for scientific computation and 87 percent for commercial computation? | Changes in computer performance, Datamation Vol 12 No 9 pp 40-54 1966 (via rd jones, acm national meeting 1967