The Postcomputer History of

Comparison of "Time Per Digit"
in certain calculations of

Year	Computer	Time	# of digits	Time per digit
1807	Wm. Shanks (by hand)	~ 15 years	707	1 week!
1844	Johann Dase (by hand)	< 2 months	200	7 hours
1947	D. F. Ferguson, desk calculator	~ 1 year	808	11 hours
1949	U.S. Army, ENIAC	70 hours	2,037	2 minutes
1954	S. C. Nicholson, J. Jeenel, NORC	13 minutes	3089	0.25 seconds
1958	F. Genuys, IBM 704	100 minutes	10,000	0.6 seconds
1961	D. Shanks, J. W. Wrench, IBM 7090	8.72 hours	100,200	1/3 second
1973	J. Guilloud, CDC 7600	23.3 hours	1,000,000	1/12 second
1983	Y. Tamura, Y. Kanada, HITAC M-28OH	< 30 hours	16,000,000	< 0.0065 second
1986	D. H. Bailey, NASA, Cray-2	28 hours	> 29,360,000	< 0.00035 second
1986	Y. Kanada, Hitachi S-810/820	8 hours	> 33,554,000	< 0.00086 second
1988	Y. Kanada, Hitachi S-820	6 hours	201,326,000	< 0.00011 second
1997	Y. Kanada and D. Takahashi, Hitachi SR2201	29 hours and 7 minutes	51,539,600,000	about 0.000002 second

To further highlight the improvements in our abilities to compute in recent years, consider this: The 1961 computation of 100,000 decimal digits of required roughly 105,000 full-precision operations, while a modern algorithm, devised by Jonathan and Peter Borwein in 1984, takes only 112 full-precision operations to achieve the same accuracy. A mere 8 iterations of their algorithm (roughly 56 operations) will produce 694 digits of (thus reducing Wm. Shanks' 15 year calculation to a matter of seconds).

On to Archimedes' method of exhaustion.