Epidemiology and the World Wide Web: Is There a 'Net Benefit?

In the early 1960s, practical epidemiology began to come under the influence of computing power. Before that time, epidemiologists had used ingenious devices such as the edge-punched card and hand-driven and even electrically driven calculating machines, all dependent on well known technology ingeniously applied. Regression analysis of study data was essentially unknown because the inversion of matrices beyond 3 x 3 by hand was far too time-consuming or well nigh impossible. Looking toward the future at that time, one would never have envisaged what in fact has taken place over the last 40 years.