Even though it was a minor part of my study, the power of that machine was impressive then. It seemed powerful just in size, for it required a few hundred square feet of floor space and demanded exquisite climate control to do what an inexpensive laptop you can carry onto an airplane with one finger can do now. But what it did was still simple statistics, seven dimensions of reductionism melded together, which was supposed to give me a more precise mathematical view of the reality cluttered by variability. Everybody knows the story of what has happened since. Because of advances in computer technology we are now able to study these same systems using numbers of variables unimaginable even ten years ago.
Systems theory is now a field.
But we still can not get our computers to reveal the emergent properties which may pop up when scale is increased or when intersecting variables come together. System programs are just another form of reductionism. Complexity, as a field, does not come out of the statistics of R.A. Fisher or systems theory. It comes out of chaos theory. Early on I was skeptical about it.