I sort of love that nine billion of something was an incomprehensibly large number of things when that story was written, but today it's like enh, 2^23ish things isn't really that many, just make sure you've got fast storage, you can do most of this in RAM....

50's sci fi author: "But surely you must need the world's most powerful computers for such an arduous, years-long task?"

Me, looking at a base model Mac Mini and thinking about going home early: "Well. uh.... yeah about that...."