1930 to 1939: The Foundations of Digital Computing - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 42

Table 2.1 Worldwide Software Applications from 1930 to 1939
Computer programming as we know it today did not really exist in the 1930s.
Instead, various controls were used to change the assumptions of electromechan-
ical computing devices. The Zuse Z1 machine was intended to be programmable,
but it did not work reliably.
Later sections of this topic will discuss application sizes, productivity rates, and
quality. There is no available data from the 1930s to make this kind of analysis
feasible. The later chapters use 1,000 function points as a standard size, which is
roughly equal to about 50,000 code statements in a language such as Java.
In the 1930s with the limited capacities of computing devices, probably the
largest mathematical applications (there were no other kinds) were less than 10
function points or perhaps 500 code instructions. Most “programs” were in the
range of 2 function points or less than 100 code instructions.
From 1930 to 1939, the world was facing a major war. Warfare brings with it
a need for many thousands of computations in order to handle logistics, ballistics,
and cryptanalysis.
In 1939, the British Navy installed an analog gun control computer on the
battleship HMS King George V . The cost of this computer was about £213,000,
which is approximately $20,000,000 in today's money. It would be many years be-