Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
But less and less connected to the mechanical innovation. Really despite cyberpunk derived fiction wanting them to be really pivotal early computers are almost useless - indeed 1970s computers aren't good for very much. They're niche products with a few specialized, and frankly not all that revolutionary applications until they're cheap enough to start putting them everywhere in the 1980s (or alternately for an old school future setting, until the expensive giant electronic brains achieve a level of AI that's still cutting edge or better here in 2020).
And if you are looking for improvements in bureaucracy and government, well, even the computers we have now don't seem to have improved the effectiveness of government bureaucracies to vastly higher levels than the late 19th century achieved without them. Maybe they're a little smaller for the amount of work, but that's about it. And Roman bureaucracy wasn't that bad to begin with, or any more chronically short-staffed than it was forced to be by limited budgets, which expensive computers are not going to help with.
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Ken Hite delt with a similar issue in
Weird War 2. The computer does bring advantages, especially over doing mathematics in Roman or Greek numerals by hand, but the real advantage is psychological. In our modern world, "the computer says so." has replaced
Deus Vault as an irrefutable argument. It's more that resoures are getting spent in areas the historical Rome ignored. The Difference engine is the excuse/justification.