First Light: The Machine That Remembered

On March 31, 1951, forty-six panels of humming metal — eight feet tall and weighing nearly fifteen tons — are rolled into a government building in Washington D.C., and the world quietly changes forever. The United States Census Bureau just received something no institution has ever owned: a commercial computer. It can do in seconds what a roomful of human clerks takes months to finish, and nobody yet has any idea what that truly means.

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