> For sure, but one of the reasons Beam didn't take this into
> consideration was that he was using a very different conceptual model of
> "electronics" for Merlin, one that looked more like the insides of 1964
> RCA television than like a modern data centre full of integrated
> circuits. That's why Merlin was "cosmic" -- meaning simply "huge" in
> this context.

Even the big vacuum tube based computers of the 1950s generated piles of
heat.

One of the design limitations was that if you had too many tubes too
close together, they'd cook themselves before you finished the calculation.

Another one was mean time to failure.  At a certain size, you'd run into
diminishing returns - the tubes would fail as quickly as yuou could
replace them or faster.

Those old machines were their own special flavor of crazy.

I think HBP handwaved the limitations of technology there to ask the
next question -  what would you do if you had such a machine?

I think the overall sweep of THFH suggests that HBO didn't think Merlin
was going to make that much of a difference - the forces of history were
too big for even a cosmic computer to over come.

OTOH - there's a stretch of time there where Conn Mawell and his
descendants might have lived long happy lives before history caught up
with them.