Professor Fursden, who had considerable experience with vacuum tubes, quickly understood Shire's intention.
He looked at the circuit on the table and said thoughtfully:
"This is just a simple single-digit addition operation, and we've used dozens of vacuum tubes."
"If we face more complex calculations, we might need thousands or even tens of thousands of vacuum tubes."
"Such a large and fragile system, a single bug entering could cause a short circuit, leading to catastrophic damage to the machine."
(The picture above is the first practical computer ENIAC, which used a total of 17,458 vacuum tubes, 7,200 diodes, and more than 7,000 resistors and tens of thousands of capacitors. The computing speed is negligible by modern standards, completing 5,000 additions or 400 multiplications per second.)
Once again, Shire felt he hadn't chosen the wrong people.
Shire might not have Turing nor Von Neumann.
