What If the Transistor Was Invented in 1921?

She was right, though the growth took a stranger shape than straight-line extrapolation would have predicted. Because solid-state computing arrived decades before anyone had built the infrastructure of trust around it — no agreed standards, no regulatory body, no cultural habit of treating a machine's output as reliable — the 1960s became less an age of computers replacing human judgment and more an age of furious, public argument about when a machine should be believed at all.

A notorious 1963 incident, in which a shipping company's linked calculating units miscounted a cargo manifest and nearly caused a dockside collision, led to the first national hearings on machine liability a full generation before such questions would otherwise have been forced. The hearings produced clumsy, overcautious rules — a mandatory human verification step for any calculation above a certain stake — that slowed deployment for a decade but also, almost by accident, built the habit of auditing machine output that a later, faster-moving age would otherwise have had to learn the hard way, through larger failures with higher stakes.

Eleanor, called to testify, was asked by a visibly skeptical senator whether she trusted her own invention. "I trust it exactly as much as it has earned," she said, "which this week is less than yesterday, and I expect that to keep changing. That's not a flaw. That's the only honest way to feel about a tool this new."