Here are some articles from a 1979 Time magazine special issue focusing on computers called “The Computer Society”

The Age of Miracle Chips – Explores possible the possible effect of computers upon society including possible economic and social upheaval.
Science: The Numbers Game – Covers the history of computers as well as the science and technology behind designing and producing them.
Business: Thinking Small - Discusses the computer industry, markets and the potential effects of computers the upon business world.
Living: Pushbutton Power – Explores computer uses in the home, school and hospital.
Time Magazine Gets a PDP-11 – Short piece by the editor of Time about the features of their new PDP-11 including it’s spell-checker, hyphenator, fonts and graphics capability.

The Age of Miracle Chips

New microtechnology will transform society

It is tiny, only about a quarter of an inch square, and quite flat. Under a microscope, it resembles a stylized Navaho rug or the aerial view of a railroad switching yard. Like the grains of sand on a beach, it is made mostly of silicon, next to oxygen the most abundant element on the surface of the earth.

Yet this inert fleck—still unfamiliar to the vast majority of Americans—has astonishing powers that are already transforming society. For the so-called miracle chip has a calculating capability equal to that of a room-size computer of only 25 years ago. Unlike the hulking Calibans of vacuum tubes and tangled wires from which it evolved, it is cheap, easy to mass produce, fast, infinitely versatile and convenient.

This computer contains 13,000 relays, each rated to perform for at least 100 million operations. If the transistors in your CPU were this reliable it would last less than 100 milliseconds.

Inside the Biggest Man-made Brain

Navy’s new calculator has steel bones, silver nerves, paper impulses, and can make mistakes.

By Stephen L. Freeland

THE LARGEST brain in the world today is a mammoth electrical mathematician being built at Harvard’s Computation Laboratory for the U. S. Navy Proving Grounds at Dahlgren, Va. But its reign as king of the robots will be brief.

Work already has begun on faster, better calculators based on the lessons learned in creating this machine, known as the Dahlgren Calculator, or Mark II, just as this one was designed to be the big, tough brother of Mark I, which was built for Harvard during the war by the International Business Machines Corp. (PSM, Oct. ’44, p. 86). Mark II, however, will not be retired. Even Mark I has many years of useful labor ahead. There is plenty of work waiting for all the big calculators now in existence and on the drawing boards. Mark I is still churning out answers to abstruse mathematical problems 24 hours a day, and Mark II will be taken to Virginia next month to begin an equally strenuous career.

MACHINE SOLVES HARD PROBLEMS

A “mechanical Einstein,” the brains of which are a set of electric relays, helps engineers of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company solve problems that would require days or weeks of figuring with pencil and paper.

The device resembles a giant telephone switchboard. When an engineer desires the solution of a complicated equation, he simply plugs in certain wires and turns proper knobs. It will reveal all the “unknown quantities” of power transmission systems.